Ariba

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Ariba Inc.

Type	Public
Traded as	NASDAQ: ARBA
Industry	Internet Software & Services
Founded	1996
Founder(s)	Bobby Lent, Boris Putanec, Paul Touw, Rob DeSantis, Ed Kinsey, Paul Heggarty, Keith Krach
Headquarters	Sunnyvale, California, U.S.
Area served	World Wide
Key people	Robert M. Calderoni, Keith Krach
Products	Spend Management Software, Contract Management Software, Financial Solutions.
Revenue	US$339M (FY 2009)
Operating income	US$15.5M (FY 2009)[1]
Net income	US$8.19M (FY 2009)[1]
Total assets	US$668M (FY 2009)[2]
Total equity	US$434M (FY 2009)[2]
Employees	2,400
Parent	SAP AG
Website	www.ariba.com

Ariba is a software and information technology services company located in Sunnyvale, California. It is going to be acquired by German software maker SAP AG for $4.3 billion in 2012.

Early life

Ariba was founded in 1996^[3] by Bobby Lent, Boris Putanec, Paul Touw, Rob Desantis, Ed Kinsey, Paul Hegarty, and Keith Krach on the idea of using the Internet to enable companies to facilitate and improve the procurement process. Procurement had been a paper-based, labor-intensive, and inefficient process for large corporations. According to the company's website, Ariba provides "Spend Management solutions" which help companies "analyze, understand, and manage their corporate spending to achieve cost savings and business process efficiency." Currently, 94 of the Fortune 100 and more than 200,000 other companies use Ariba's SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions to manage their spend and commerce activities.^[4]

Ariba was one of the first business-to-business Internet companies to go public (in 1999).^[5] The company's stock more than tripled from the offering price on opening day^[6][7], making the three year-old company worth $6 billion. In 2000, the stock value continued to climb, and Ariba's market capitalization was as high as $40 billion. With the bursting of the dot-com bubble, Ariba's stock price fell dramatically to the low double digits in July 2001, where it has remained since, with a market capitalization of just over $1.5 billion as of June 2010.

Past acquisitions and competitors

On December 17, 1999 Ariba announced it would acquire Atlanta based TRADEX Technologies Inc. in a stock swap valued then at $1.87 billion.^[8][9] TRADEX was the leader in the nascent Digital Marketplace Software field. The stock market liked the acquisition and the price of Ariba's shares rose from $57 at the time of the announcement to $173 at closing on March 9, 2000, which also marked the peak of the Internet Bubble. The 33.2 million shares that Ariba issued to buy TRADEX were then worth $5.6 billion to TRADEX shareholders.

In January 2001 Ariba announced that it would acquire Agile Software in a $2.55 billion stock swap.^[10] By April, with Ariba facing a disappointing second quarter and cutting a third of its workforce, the deal had fallen apart.^[11]

In early 2004, Ariba acquired FreeMarkets^[12] which gave the company a software package both in the upstream (sourcing) and downstream (buyer) of the procurement process. In late 2007, Ariba took over the company Procuri, which enhanced the company's client base and on-demand abilities.^[13]

Ariba's competitors include PROACTIS, SAP, Bravosolution, Oracle, Global eProcure, Zycus, Rosslyn Analytics, Ivalua, Tradeshift, Coupa, and Emptoris.^[14]

In December 2008, Ariba announced that the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas had issued an injunction against Emptoris, which prohibits the company from infringing on two of Ariba's patents related to overtime and bid ceilings in reverse auctions.^[15] On 16 December 2008, the court ordered Emptoris to pay an enhanced damages award of $1.4 million for willful infringement in connection with Emptoris’ infringement of the two reverse auction-patents held by Ariba. This was in addition to the 29 October 2008 jury award of $5 million in damages to Ariba, bringing the total fine to approximately $6.4 million, a significant penalty for Emptoris which earned approximately $50 million in revenue for 2008. In an Emptoris press release, that company noted that it had released a new software "patch" that eliminates any infringement. The U.S. District Court, in February 2009, issued an order noting that the "patch" is colorably different, effectively concluding the case.

In November, 2010, Ariba announced that it would acquire Quadrem, a privately-held provider of one of the world's largest supply networks and on-demand supply management solutions.^[16] The acquisition closed in January 2011.

In October, 2011 Ariba announced the acquisition of b-process a privately-held French company and european leader in electronic invoicing service provider for approximately €35 million in cash.^[17]

AribaWeb

On February 19, 2009 Ariba announced AribaWeb,^[18] an open source framework for Rich Internet Applications. It is designed to generate a user interface automatically from base Java or Groovy classes and includes Object-Relational Mapping features. It also encapsulates AJAX functionality^[19] and has a broad selection of UI widgets.

SAP to acquire Ariba

On May 22, 2012 the German business software maker SAP AG announced to acquire Ariba for an estimated $4.3 billion dollars. SAP said it will pay $45 a share. JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank AG advised SAP on the sale, while Morgan Stanley provided financial counsel to Ariba^[20]. The acquisition is assumed to be completed in the third quarter 2012, subject to approval by Ariba shareholders and regulators. ^[21]

References

External links

• Ariba's website
• Procuri's website
• AribaWeb website