Mark Perera

What’s my quick take on The Ariba Cloud strategy? Simply put, the Cloud is a very easy place from which to hang Ariba’s existing solutions and justify a larger market opportunity. Ariba Discovery, one of the centerpieces of the cloud, is completely unoriginal (it’s a modification of the original suppliermarket.com and more recent MFG.com business model), yet making it work requires just the type of liquidity that Ariba has the potential to offer if they can convince the majority of their buying organizations to put down Thomas, Global Spec and others when they’re searching for new suppliers (I’ve never met a large company that uses Alibaba in the West so I don’t consider them Discovery competition).