Analysis: Accenture Picks Up Ariba’s Sourcing Services Assets (Part 1)
Earlier today, Accenture announced that it was taking ownership of Ariba’s sourcing services business (you can read our initial take on the deal here). As one sell-side analyst noted succinctly (and appropriately) in quick e-mail …
A Teachable Moment in Customer Service
Last week I stopped at a gas station to fill up and my credit card was declined. This was very distressing to me because I am obsessively fastidious about paying our bills, to the point that I pay my visa and amex bill in full as soon as I get it and sometimes I will [...]
Ariba Sells Sourcing Services, BPO Businesses to Accenture
In a surprise move, Ariba announced this morning that they were selling their sourcing services and BPO businesses to Accenture. At the time of the announcement, it was not clear whether all of these assets would end up with Acce…
Symantec need to stop hiding their Green light under a bushel
I attended Symantec’s Vision 2010 event in Barcelona yesterday and I found it to be hugely frustrating! Symantec are one of the world’s largest computer security companies with 31,000 customers, 18,400 employees (PDF), and revenue in 2009 of $6.2 billion. At yesterday’s Vision event however, they missed lots of great opportunities to talk up their [...]
Accenture bags Ariba’s sourcing practice to extend its global category management capabilities
Today, Accenture annouced a significant move to incorporate Ariba’s managed services business into its own global procurement and sourcing operations, which adds signifanct category expertise across to both Accenture’s existing European procurment oper…
Will Social Media Converge With Procurement and Supply Chain Applications? (Part 1)
Reading this column by Bill Kutik about the convergence of social media with HR applications once again made me think about the possibilities of integrating greater social activity into the very core of the tools we use as procure…
Birth of the Social
My favorite scene in The Social Network is when Mark Zuckerberg’s character has an epiphany that Facebook’s screen should have a field to designate a user’s status, as in relationship status or availability. Wait, I didn’t give something away did I? You’ve seen the movie, right? No? Go see it. I’ll wait. There. Zuckerberg, Facebook’s [...]
Romans, Barbarians, and innovation.
Yesterday, Thomas Friedman of NYT quoted from the historian Lewis Mumford’s book, “The Condition of Man,” about the development of civilisation. Mumford was describing Rome’s decline: “Everyone aimed at security: no one accepted responsibility. What was plainly lacking, long before…
Ariba StartSourcing/StartContracts — Commendable SMB Effort, Not as Cheap as they Seem (Part 2)
In the first installment of this post, we explored the basic capabilities of Ariba StartSourcing and StartContracts, two new low-end configurations of popular Ariba products aimed towards the small business market. In today’s cont…
