SAP Ariba’s CMO, Tifenn Dano Kwan, speaks at Ariba Live 2019 in Austin, Texas, on April 2. (Jason Busch / Spend Matters)Spend Matters analysts Xavier Olivera, Pierre Mitchell and Jason Busch are attending SAP Ariba Live this week in Austin. This is the first time the customer event has been co-located with the SAP Fieldglass Summit.
The two divisions are now “one” within SAP, and we’ll have more details on that development later.
The Spend Matters analyst team will be reporting live from the event, with our PRO subscription coverage appearing this week and next. We’ll share our findings and analysis of a variety of themes that we expect to hear more on.
What’s on our mind? Here are a few topics:
- How can we compare SAP Ariba’s size/growth to other vendors in the sector? What does this tell us?
- What is the state of the Ariba network? Numbers, offerings, etc.
- What is the integration (P&L, solutions, go-to-market, etc.) of SAP Ariba and SAP Fieldglass looking like?
- What UI standard is SAP applying to SAP Fieldglass, SAP Ariba and SAP Concur?
- What is the opportunity for SAP Ariba and SAP Fieldglass (remaining) in the SAP customer base? Greenfield, semi-penetrated or penetrated? How are ECC to S/4HANA upgrades impacting this potential?
- How is the IBM Emptoris partnership playing out? Emptoris customer migrations, artificial intelligence (Watson), systems integration, consulting, BPO and other topics included.
- What are the investments in direct spend looking like at SAP Ariba? What are the latest themes in the areas of sourcing, direct materials connectivity/network/EDI, supplier collaboration and related topics?
- How are SAP Ariba’s investments and products that leverage Leonardo-based artificial intelligence evolving?
- What is the latest with guided buying across the SAP cloud procurement portfolio, not just SAP Ariba?
- In areas of trade financing (supply chain finance/approved trade payables financing, dynamic discounting, virtual card and accounts receivable financing), what investment is SAP Ariba making?
- How is the SAP Ariba partnership and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model taking shape to drive standards, interoperability and out-of-the-box connectivity between trading partners?
- How is the broader SAP Ariba partnership (systems integration, channels, VARs, BPOs, etc.) evolving?
These themes just scratch the surface of what we’re looking to get to the bottom of in the next couple of days at SAP Ariba Live. In the meantime, for organizations looking for product analysis of SAP Ariba compared to Basware, Coupa, GEP, Ivalua, Oracle, SynerTrade, Tradeshift, Wax Digital, Zycus and other providers, we encourage you to review Spend Matters latest SolutionMap comparative ranking charts and Insider reports that individually (module) and collectively (suite) span the following areas:
SolutionMap reports includes both analyst rankings/scoring and customer peer reviews (both of which are drillable at the subscriber level). And for companies going through a vetting or provider selection process, SolutionMap Accelerator provides a faster, better and cheaper way of determining and selecting an optimal final shortlist of candidates (or a single vendor) based on a one-to-one business requirements map — and even skipping the RFI process entirely.
