It's official. Ariba and SAP have teamed up to take over the world. Cue Dr. Evil, "Muahahahah".
Well, maybe not the world, but pretty close to it. Here are some key takeaways on one of the biggest acquisitions in SAP's history.
- Power in numbers. Both SAP and Ariba already have MASSIVE traction in the procurement line of business. SAP's 190,000+ customers already drive 63% of the worlds global transactions. Match that with Ariba's 5+ million customers and 730,000 company supply newtwork and you've got a pretty serious user base.
- It's all about the Network. Or as I like to call it, the "Amazon.com" of the B2B community. This is more than just a registry of suppliers, this is a global marketplace. The Ariba Network is home to over 730,000 suppliers both big and small. That's right, 730,000, with a new supplier being added every 8 and a half minutes. That amounts to around $300 billion dollars a year in transactions. The Network allows you to buy, sell, manage, and interact effortlessly with your supply base. If it seems like the perfect addition to your SRM/Operational Procurement environment, thats becuase it is. Now SAP customers can utilize the Ariba Network together with their On-Premise solutions. It truly is the best of both worlds.
- Solutions On-Demand and On-Premise. SAP will now be able to offer procurement solutions behind a companies firewall as well as in the cloud. The choice is up to our customers. Both companies offer a suite of products that enable the complete end to end source-to-pay process. Pick the roll-out menthodology that works best for your organization.
The combination of SAP and Ariba allows us to offer the most comprehensive, end-to-end spend management portfolio,from spend analysis, to sourcing and contract management and procure-to-pay, across all consumption models - running in the cloud or on premise, and on any device.
So now I'd like to ask you, what are your thoughts?
