As the Spend Matters team gets cranking on its coverage of theSAP收购Fieldglass, we present an oldie but goodie that dates back almost three years. I’m reprinting below an old post of mine in its entirety:What Does Ariba Have Up Its Services Procurement Sleeve?
As an anonymous source on our team commented after reading this, “They finally got what they wanted. Back to mother Ariba. Very Putin-esque…”
转载如下：原始出版日期2011年5月6日
Ariba早就知道，为了实现其愿景——称之为“商业云”、“支出管理”或诸如此类——服务采购必须摆在桌面上。一段时间以来，Ariba通过一个用户可以配置的定制驱动程序（我们知道公司已经将其用于印刷、法律和其他支出领域），在解决SOW支出方面拥有相当不错的能力（如果不是压倒性的话）。上一次我们在2009年对它进行了审查，它并不是行业领先的，但它起到了作用。
当时，通过Ariba服务采购解决方案的应急支出约占总量的50%，而SOW支出占总量的另一半。然而，随着当时市场的发展（就像现在一样），阿里巴很少被认为是与独立VMS平台相比的参与者，因为在大多数大型平台交易中，阿里巴的意外或非意外支出（Fieldglass、IQNavigator、，Beeline，PeopleClick Authoria和Provade，在某些情况下，是更常见的虚拟机选择）。很明显，阿里巴现在希望改变这一点。
有大量证据表明，阿里巴正在采取行动——不仅仅是营销辞令——更积极地追求这个行业。考虑以下事项：
- Ariba是Fieldglass（最终被私募股权公司麦迪逊·迪尔伯恩收购）的竞标方之一
- Ariba continues a partnership with numerous VMS providers that integrate into its solutions (and Ariba has made some strides on SaaS P2P integration for VMS, but not as many as some organizations may require)
- The company has continued to seek out and maintain partnerships with focused consultants in the past year in the area — they’ve also recently worked with expert partners on roll-outs of their service procurement capabilities, something that was often off the table before (as Ariba kept services in house in the past); yet hurdles remain on establishing and maintaining relationships with the staffing firms and MSPs
- At Ariba LIVE in April, Ariba employees were overheard telling Beeline employees that they would soon buy them (which was news to folks at Beeline, especially considering Adecco’s strong commitment to the organization and growing R&D investment in it)
- 就在直播前一两周，Ariba决定将另一个VMS合作伙伴从活动中驱逐出去（也许他们认为谁是竞争对手，或者未来的竞争对手？）
Our own due diligence in talking to those close to Ariba suggests that while it appears there is no major platform overhaul or significant contingent or SOW upgrade for Ariba’s VMS or category driver capability — outside of normal incremental release enhancements — on the horizon, that clearly something is up in this area. Which, of course, makes perfect sense. Services procurement is a giant opportunity within the Ariba customer base, and one that few organizations are tackling well. Yet whether Ariba finally decides to get very serious about this sector and executes a bold move to create broader penetration within the market — as a number of folks inside Ariba would clearly like to see — remains to be seen.
Still, no one should count them out of this critical and growing procurement market segment. From a business model fit with network/transactional-based revenue on the VMS/contingent front to the ability to further penetrate existing accounts (many of which aren’t doing much in the area) with an up-sell that could result in greater annual revenue than standard P2P deployments, the services spend opportunity is an ideal one for Ariba. And this why we believe there’s something up their sleeve in this area.
Stay tuned for more coverage of SAP’s announced acquisition of Fieldglass throughout the day.
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