Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast in what's ahead for Ariba in helping companies collaborate on procurement, sales, and improving productivity.

1. Ariba Product Roadmap Points to New Value From Cloud
Data Analytics, Mobile Support, and Managed Services
Procurement
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast in what's ahead for Ariba in helping companies
collaborate on procurement, sales, and improving productivity.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: Ariba, an SAP Company
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you
from the 2013 Ariba LIVE Conference in Washington, D.C.
We're here in the week of May 6 to explore the latest in collaborative
commerce and to learn how innovative companies are tapping into the
networked economy. We'll see how they are improving their business
productivity and sales, along with building far-reaching relationships with new
partners and customers.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your host throughout the
series of Ariba-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions. [Disclosure: Ariba, an SAP company, is a
sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
Our next interview focuses on the product and services roadmap and improved strategy insights
unveiled by Ariba, an SAP company, here at the Ariba LIVE Conference.
Here to explain the latest news and offer some forthcoming innovation insights for how Ariba
will be addressing its customers’ needs as well as its partners and ecosystem requirements is
Chris Haydon. He is Vice President of Solutions Management for Procurement, Finance, and
Network at Ariba. Welcome, Chris.
Chris Haydon: Thank you, Dana. Nice to be with you.
Gardner: Before we look to the future roadmap, maybe we should define the milestones of the
current roadmap. Could you characterize where we are now with Ariba in terms of some of the
big news here at LIVE?
Haydon: I'm happy to share that. We have some really exciting innovation coming in the near
term to Ariba, as you said, in a couple of areas. First, let's talk about Network RFQ or the Spot
Buy. We think this is part of the undiscovered country, where, according to The Hackett Group,
40-plus percent of spend is not sourced.
By linking this non-sourced spend to the Ariba Network, we think we're going to be able to
address a large pain point for our buyers and our sellers. Network RFQ or Spot Buy is a near-

2. term solution that we announced here at LIVE here, and we're bringing that forward the next six
months.
The next exciting innovation is at the other end of the
process. That’s a solution we call AribaPay. AribaPay is
what we think is a game-changing solution that delivers rich
remittance and invoice information that’s only available from the Ariba Network through
solution secure, global payment infrastructure.
And I'll talk a little bit later about some of the more exciting things we're doing in services
procurement.
Down market
Gardner: It seems to me, Chris, that, in a sense, you're going down market. You're creating
some services with Spot Buy that help people in their ad-hoc, low-volume purchasing.
You're providing more services types of purchasing capabilities, maybe for those mid-market
organizations or different kinds of companies like services-oriented companies. And, you're also
connecting via Dell Boomi to QuickBooks, which is an important asset for how people run small
businesses. Am I reading this right? Are we expanding the addressable market here?
Haydon: We are, and that’s an excellent point. We look at it two ways. We're looking to address
all commerce. Things like the Spot Buy, AribaPay, services, procurement, and
estimate-based services are really addressing the breadth of spend, and that
applies at the upper end and the lower end.
There are important pieces that you touched on, especially with our Dell Boomi
partnership and the announcement here for QuickBooks. We want to make it
accessible to grow the ecosystem and to make the collaboration across the
network as frictionless as possible.
With Dell Boomi announcing QuickBooks, it enables suppliers specifically with that backend
system to be able to comply with all the collaboration of business processes on the Ariba
Network, and we're really only just getting started.
There is a massive ecosystem out there with QuickBooks, but when we have a look around, there
are more than 120 prominent backend systems. So it's not just the SAPs, the Oracles, the JD
Edwards, and Lawsons. It's the QuickBooks and the Intuits. It's the Great Plains of the world.
Gardner: So for those who may have thought that procurement vis-à-vis the cloud, procurement
vis-à-vis on-premises backend business application system, was just for the larger enterprises, it's
not so.

3. Haydon: Not so at all. That’s what we really want to think about. Think about at it as backend
agnostic. We want our customers on both the buy-side and the sell-side of their partners to make
their own choices. It's really their own choice of deployment.
If they want to take an integrated business-to-business (B2B) channel, they can. If they want to
come to a portal, they can. If they want to have an extract that goes into their own customized
system, they can do that as well, or all of the above at the same time, and really just taking that
process forward.
Gardner: We've seen a larger market. We're also seeing the notion of one-stop shopping with
Ariba, because with AribaPay people can now begin to execute payments through the same
cloud, through which they would organize and manage procurement and spend. Tell me how that
works? Is this a credit card, a debit card? Is this a transactional banking interface? What does
AribaPay really mean?
Brand new
Haydon: Number one, it's brand-new. First, let's talk about the problems that we had, and how
we think we are going to address it. More than 40 percent of payments in corporate America are
still check based. Check-based payments present their own problems, not just for the buyers, but
also from the sellers. They don’t know when they're going to get paid. And when they are getting
paid, how do they reconcile what they're actually getting paid for?
AribaPay is a new service. It's not a P-Card. It's leveraging a new type of electronic payment
through an ACH-styled channel. It enables buyers to take 100 percent of their payments through
the Ariba Network. It lets the suppliers opt in to be able to match and move from our paper-based
payment channel check, to an electronic channel that is married. This is the interesting value
prop for the network. That is married with their rich information.
So that’s the value. We think it's very differentiated. We're going to be leveraging a large
financial institution provider who has great breadth and penetration, not just here in the United
States, but globally as well.
Gardner: And that would be the Discover Financial Services?
Haydon: That's correct -- Discover Financial Services. We announced that at LIVE today, and I
know they're as excited as we are,. They have the wherewithal to bring the credibility and the
scale to the payments channel, while Ariba has the credibility in the scale of the supply base and
the commercial B2B traffic. We think that that one plus one equals three and is a game changer
in electronic payments.
Gardner: Moving on to the future or vision that you're painting for the attendees here at LIVE,
you've been talking about three buckets: network enhancements -- the Ariba Network --

4. application enhancements, and infrastructure enhancement. So let's start with network. What
should we expect in the roadmap of the next two or three years for the Ariba Network?
Haydon: We're really excited about the Ariba Network and what we are going to do there. When
we think about the network, we've got four or five themes. One piece of big news is that we're
getting into and supporting supply chain and logistics processes, and adding that level of
collaboration. Today, we have 10 or 11 types of collaborations that you can do on the Ariba
Network, like an order, an invoice, and so on.
Over the next several releases, we're going to be more than doubling that amount of
collaboration that you can do between trading partners on the network. That’s exciting, and there
are things like forecasting and goods receipt notices.
I won’t go into the specifics of every single transaction, but think about of doubling the amount
of collaboration that you can do and the visibility in that. The ability to apply your own business
rules and logic to those collaborations is massive.
The second thing we're doing on the network is adding a new spend category, which we call
services invoicing. This is estimate-based spend and this is another up market, down market,
broad approach, in which there are a whole heap of services.
This is more of an estimate-based style spend where you don’t necessarily know the full cost of
an item until you finish it. Whether you're drilling an oil well or constructing a building, there are
variations there. So we're adding that capability into the network.
User interface
Another area is what we call Network 2.0, and this is extending and changing not just the user
interface, but extending and adding more intrinsic core capabilities to the network. Ariba has a
number of network assets and we think it's important to have a single network platform globally.
It's the commerce internet, the network.
So our Network 2.0 program is a phase delivery of extending the core capabilities of the Ariba
network over the next couple of years in terms of order status, results, requests in terms of goods
receipt notices, advanced shipping notices, more invoice capability, and just growing that out
globally.
Last but not least is just more and more supply collaboration, focusing on the ability for suppliers
to more easily respond, comply, and manage their profiles on the Ariba network.
Gardner: So it's more visibility across these processes across organizational boundaries, more
ability to leverage each others' data and to hook up processes, which of course, all means much
more efficient business, lower cost, and agility. That services procurement possibility, where you

5. don't have to actually know the end price, but you can start the process, nonetheless, brings in
that agility very well. Applications themselves, what should we expect there?
Haydon: We've got a whole raft of capability coming across that whole application suite. We can
break that into two or three areas. In our sourcing, contract management, supplier information
management, and supply performance management suite, we're doing functionality
enhancements on one of the exciting pieces.
In the spend visibility area, we're going to be leveraging the SAP In-Memory technology HANA.
What we are doing there is early for us, but there are some very exciting, encouraging results in
terms of the speed and the performance we've heard about from SAP. Running our own
technology on that and seeing the results is exciting for us and will be exciting for our customers.
That's one interesting specific area in Spend Vis that we're starting on progressing. And there is
good core enhancing in our contract management and our sourcing areas, core-functional rich
requirements, and user interface, better integration layers, and just making that whole process
more seamless.
As we move more into our procurement suite, we're introducing a new look and feel, a consumer
like look and feel, to our catalog and our search engine. The more Amazon-style search touches
more users than anyone else. As you can imagine, that’s how they need to requisition tools. So
making that a friendly UI and taking that UI or user experience through to the other products is
fantastic.
One of the other most exciting areas for us is services procurement, a very large investment for
us. Services procurement is our application to be able to support temporary or contingent labor,
statement of work or consulting labor, print, marketing and also light industrial. This really is one
of the underpinning differences for Ariba, and this is where we're bringing it together.
We're not just building applications any more. We're building network-centric applications or
network-aware applications. It means that when we're launching our new services procurement
solution, not only are we are going to have a brand-new, refreshed, modern user interface, which
is very important.
Differential insights
We're going to be able to leverage the power of the Ariba Network to provide differential
insights, into standard day-to-day services procurement on-boarding. That will be looking at
average labor rates in the area for the type of service that you're buying and using the network
intelligence to give you advice, to give you instruction, to help you manage exceptions on the
network.
For example, you want to put in $70 an hour for a rate for a web developer, based on the network
intelligence on what like-minded peers are doing. Of course, this is all anonymized and

6. aggregated in the appropriate way, but we're able to say, "You're out of market. It's $75 in this
market." So if you put $70, you're not going to be able to do that. That's just one example of the
intelligence in the network for services procurement.
Gardner: What’s really interesting to me is all of your vision so tightly aligns with the mega
trends of today. There's cloud computing. You talked about the collaboration, the network, and
the benefits of that. There's big data. You've talked about the analytics, the ability to bring more
data into these processes, across the processes, even across organizational boundaries, rather than
to be siloed not only within their own silos, but in each individual company's silos.
Furthermore, the big data trend to me is manifested here by the fact that you're recognizing that
data as a definition is shifted. Data used to be an output of an app. The primary data was
secondary. We've seen that flip, where the data is the app, and we're able to take the data, use it,
and apply it across more processes, and it becomes the app itself. So there's kind of a munge
going on and you're certainly on top of that.
Lastly, there's mobility, and we haven't talked about that too much, but it seems that your app
interfaces, your software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud delivery models are taking these
processes right down to the individual at the mobile moment, where they are in business, when
they need to either spot buy, engage in a service, and then even buy and execute with pay.
What's the last mega trend of the day? Social? You're into that too, because we are seeing more
collaboration in the network.
One last mega trend is being able to take this one step further, which is to be proactive and see
more insight into processes in business environments. So, analytics, but at a higher level. What
should we expect when we look at the resources of SAP, the In-Memory technology
improvements with HANA and your being more comprehensive and then expanding addressable
market. You're able to bring together tremendous amount of data, and exercising the proper
privacy and access controls, start to deliver strategic insights back to your customers. Tell me
little bit about the potential.
Haydon: Absolutely. I don’t think we touched on that. When we think about the networked
economy, the networked apps, the network-centric apps, the network itself, one should be able to
connect any demand generating or receiving system. We touched on that with Dell Boomi, but
it's seamless integration across the piece. We want to be comprehensive, which is adding more
collaboration.
Critical mass
The interesting thing about this collaboration, is it starts driving at some levels a critical mass
of data. The trend is that the network is intelligent. It's actually able to piece together not just the
transaction itself, but who you are. We're quite excited, because this is the massive differentiator

7. of the network. You talked about apps. We have not just the transactional data, but we have the
master data, and we can also take other sources of information.
Gardner: Say weather or location?
Haydon: Weather, location, stock reports, SEC filings, Dun & Bradstreet writings, whatever
you like, to intersect.
So this data plus knowledge gives you information. With SAP, it's a very exciting technology.
SAP InfoNet, Supplier InfoNet, is able to leverage network data. Today, it has over 160 feeds. It's
smart, meaning it's smart intelligence. It can automatically take those feeds and contextualize.
And that's the real thing we're trying to do -- knowing who the user is, knowing the business
process they are trying to execute, and also knowing what they are trying to achieve. And it's
bringing that information to the point of demand to help them make actionable, intelligent, and
sometimes predictive decisions.
Where we would like to go is, heaven forbid there is another tsunami, but let's just work through
that use case. You get a news alert there is tsunami in Japan again, terrible event. What if you
knew that, and what if 80 percent of your core, raw material inputs came from there? Just that
alert of that to notify you to saying you've got to know that you might well have a supply
problem. What are you going to do?
And by the way, here are three or four other suppliers who can supply this material to you, and
they're available on the network. What is that worth? Immeasurable.
Gardner: I think that's very interesting roadmap for a few more years. I'm interested in coming
back next year to Ariba LIVE to learn how we're executing on that.
Clearly, a lot of the trends, as I say, are aligned well with where you are and put some wind in
your sails. I also think that Ariba and SAP together are in a catbird seat of being in the right place
to extend these values, up and down the supply chain, into new markets, across different aspects
of business, like business continuity, and even project and portfolio management, getting to
where people are, where they are working through their mobile devices. So congratulations on
that.
I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been learning more about the product and services
roadmap and improved strategy from Ariba, an SAP company, here at the Ariba LIVE
Conference.
So please join me in thanking our guest, Chris Haydon, the Vice President of Solutions
Management for Procurement, Finance & Network at Ariba. Thanks, Chris.
Haydon: Thank you.

8. Gardner: And thanks to our audience for joining this special podcast coming to you from the
2013 Ariba LIVE Conference in Washington D.C.
I'm Dana Gardner; Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of
Ariba sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions. Thanks again for joining, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: Ariba, an SAP Company
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast in what's ahead for Ariba in helping companies
collaborate on procurement, sales, and improving productivity. Copyright Interarbor Solutions,
LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.
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