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

Early life

Ariba was founded in 1996 by 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."

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,Fact: date=September 2008 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 fell dramatically, where it lingered until May, 2003. In early 2008, the company's market capitalization exceeded $1 billion USD due to sudden increase in stock price.

Past acquisitions and competitors

In early 2004, Ariba acquired FreeMarkets 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.

Ariba's competitors include SAP, Oracle, Zycus, Basware, and Emptoris.

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. In an Emptoris press release, that company noted that it had released a new software "patch" that eliminates any infringement. The US District Court, in February 2009, issued an order noting that the "patch" is colorably different and denied Ariba's motion for review of that software code, effectively concluding the case.

AribaWeb

On February 19, 2009 Ariba announced AribaWeb, 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 and has a broad selection of UI widgets.

External links

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