The two companies have been in a strategic relationship since July 2003, and Softface will give Ariba technology in the area of spend data cleansing, enrichment and classification. Ariba said this will allow organizations to take problematic, largely unclassified data from multiple, disparate systems and convert it into actionable spend information.
To back its strategy, Ariba quoted Tim Minaham, VP of supply chain research at the Aberdeen group, as saying that few companies know how much they spend and with whom. He estimated it is costing businesses $260bn in missed savings opportunities a year.
To reverse a long period of decline, Ariba has been buying aggressively, and this year paid $493m for rival Freemarkets Inc and bought procurement outsourcing specialist Alliente Inc. Earlier this year Ariba CEO Bob Calderoni told ComputerWire: I want to be the leader in the spend management category. That means selling solutions to the spend management problem, which means services as well as software.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
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