The module has access to syndicated data from more than 600,000 sources and utilizes continuous monitoring and machine learning techniques to analyze over 200 environmental and social factors that companies can use to profile their suppliers against. One of the ways it’s doing this is via its Supplier Risk module that makes risk due diligence a natural part of the procurement process. Here’s some of the insights from our conversation. Padgett’s views on the company’s platform strategy, the power of ecosystems, his approach to further expanding the SAP Ariba ecosystem, and where enabling technologies and trends such as AI, IoT and Industry 4.0 may take the company in the future. That’s over two times the annual commerce volume of Alibaba, Amazon and eBay combined. Platforms have proven themselves in the high tech and B2C space with household names such as Apple, Airbnb, Microsoft and Uber and in recent years have become the go-to strategy for B2B industry clouds such as those of GE Predix, Philips HealthSuite and many others.Īt the recent SAP Ariba Live conference in the Netherlands, I had an opportunity to sit down with Barry Padgett, President, SAP Ariba, to discuss what is one of the world’s largest and most successful platform business models – the SAP Ariba network which supports over 3.3 million companies in over 190 countries, and which conducts over $1.7 trillion in commerce annually. Due to their network effects and ability to create a virtuous cycle where the benefit of a product or service increases as more people use it, platform business models have become the dominant business model for the digital economy.

For most tech-company CEOs and entrepreneurs, having a platform business model and successfully taking it to scale is stuff of legend.

Ariba bidding platform