Ariba

Ariba () is a software and information technology services company located in Sunnyvale, California.

Early life

Ariba was founded in 1996 by Bobby Lent, Boris Putanec, Paul Touw, Rob Desantis, Ed Kinsey, Paul Heggarty, 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.

Ariba was one of the first business-to-business Internet companies to go public (in 1999). The company's stock more than tripled from the offering price on opening day, 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 17th, 1999 Ariba announced...
Read More