Posted on Tue, May 22, 2012 @ 08:07 PM
By Edward Jackson, President
OK…you just knew someone was going to pick up Ariba eventually. SAP and IBM had seemed like top contenders for sometime. So, the move happened. Now what???
From our perspective, we think this makes the Oracle accounts with either an all E-Business Stack or PeopleSoft Enterprise, and either some legacy Ariba Buyer and Spend Management license products or even those that moved to Ariba On-Demand, reevaluate this decision. While Ariba is currently stand alone and I am sure there are strong statements coming from the current Ariba management team that big change is not going to occur immediately and support will be better than ever and blah blah blah…the long and short is the SAP tool stack is the way forward now if you own Ariba.
For SAP, it is hard to rationalize two entirely different technology stacks (MySAP/SRM 7.0 vs. Ariba proprietary java based applications). Ultimately, if you own Ariba software, you are now a future owner of the SAP stack if you stay with Ariba and its product roadmap and migration going forward. This would lead me to think that many a CIO/CPO/CFO sitting on an Oracle based stack are going to quite questioningly ask, not "if," but when do they make the move off Ariba to all single stack. For those on SAP with Ariba, life got better. For those on Oracle, it is "Ariba-derci" time.