Ariba/SAP Content

SAP and Microsoft announced a new integration plan Tuesday that deploys SAP HANA on the Microsoft Azure cloud and links SAP applications, including Ariba, with Microsoft Office 365, giving procurement organizations opportunities for enhanced collaboration, functionality and connectivity within the tools they regularly use. According to Joe Fox, senior vice president of business development and strategy at SAP Ariba, the partnership with Microsoft shows SAP/Ariba’s commitment to delivering innovation through an open platform

To say that the supplier network business model itself has crossed the chasm would be an understatement. For companies like Ariba/SAP, network revenue has become one of the very core components of overall growth — and the network model itself has become a key value proposition to customers, including supplier enablement, transactional connectivity and supply chain risk management. We will be talking about networks and related enabling technologies, including cloud, platform as a service (PaaS) and blockchain, with ISM at the Global Procurement Technology Summit taking place on March 14–16 in Baltimore.

It’s official. While his pending departure from SAP was rumored for months, Tim Minahan, without question the single most influential marketing leader in the procurement space in the past decade, has left SAP for Citrix. Tim had most recently served as chief marketing officer for SAP Cloud and prior to that was the chief marketing officer of Ariba. Before Ariba, he started as journalist/analyst before making the jump to the “dark side” (i.e., the vendor world) as the head of marketing for Procuri — which Ariba eventually acquired.

The history of banks and related financial institutions (e.g., American Express) getting into anything having to do with purchase-to-pay (P2P) is a road paved with […]