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Technology Stocks : Ariba Technologies (Nasdaq-ARBA) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: D. K. G. who wrote (4)	4/28/1999 5:45:00 PM
From: ioioioi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2110

Great Marketing and Sales team. They will be a high flyer soon.

To: D. K. G. who wrote (4)	5/5/1999 9:12:00 PM
From: D. K. G.	Respond to of 2110

PENCIL PUSHER Ariba's humble chief executive, Keith Krach, underlines his collaborative approach. By Constance Loizos The Red Herring magazine July 1998 redherring.com Before we arrive at Ariba Technologies' Sunnyvale offices, the company's CEO, Keith Krach, explains that he's uneasy about being singled out for our top-entrepreneur distinction. Telling his story makes him, "well, a little uncomfortable." It's only mildly surprising, then, when we enter a conference room and find Mr. Krach flanked by five men who he declares are all cofounders of Ariba, the two-year-old procurement software startup that's running roughshod over later entrants to the space. By putting procurement systems online, Ariba is automating direct-from-supplier purchases of mundane things like pencils and paper clips. The company has already secured Advanced Micro Devices, Cisco Systems, and Visa as customers, and the market it's penetrating is enormous. The Giga Information Group estimates that $250 billion is spent annually on the routine procurement of office supplies. Ariba's revenues were nearly $23 million last year. Just this morning, Ariba vice president of sales Rob DeSantis has signed FedEx as the company's newest customer. After introducing the drowsy Mr. DeSantis as the seventh cofounder--joining Boris Putanec, Edward Kinsey, Bobby Lent, Paul Hegarty, and Paul Touw--Mr. Krach encourages the men to speak freely about themselves. Instead they spell out why Ariba couldn't have gotten started without him. Mr. Krach was working at Benchmark Capital in Menlo Park when he first focused his attention on the Internet and electronic commerce. He had joined Benchmark in 1996 in response to entreaties from Bob Kagle, a general partner at the venture capital firm. Mr. Kagle had been impressed that Mr. Krach, who began his career at General Motors, had become GM's youngest vice president ever at 26 and, in his next position, as chief operating officer of a mechanical design automation software company, had played a key role in its $200 million sell-off. So Mr. Kagle wanted to be within earshot when Mr. Krach decided what venture he would embark on next. As fate--with a push from Mr. Kagle--would have it, Mr. Hegarty was exploring opportunities in e-commerce in a Benchmark office opposite Mr. Krach's. Mr. Hegarty, who had previously headed up engineering at Next Software, had been recruited as Benchmark's technology expert. He and Mr. Krach decided to form an enterprise systems company together. Soon they were introduced to Mr. Lent and Mr. Putanec by John Mumford of Crosspoint Ventures. Mr. Mumford had been working closely with Mr. Lent and Mr. Putanec at Crosspoint, where the two had hatched a concept for business-to-business procurement services. Excited by their ideas and friendly with Mr. Kagle, Mr. Mumford quickly summoned all of the men to an office at Benchmark. In the course of a discussion in early September 1996, Ariba was born. Benchmark and Crosspoint immediately poured a collective $5.5 million into the startup (Ariba's most recent financing round valued it at $120 million). Back at the Ariba conference room, Mr. Krach says that "the company with the best people wins." Although he has yielded the floor to his cofounders this morning, he wants to ensure that we've gotten a sense of his team's dynamic before we shuffle toward the door. "Around here," he says, "you'll see some belly laughs, some high fives, a little cussing. There's passion coming from these offices!" Given Ariba's quick success, it's understandable that its cofounders are feeling exuberant. Nevertheless, Mr. Krach, having grown visibly self-conscious, wishes us well and disappears. But first he thanks his cofounders for their time.

To: D. K. G. who wrote (4)	5/5/1999 9:17:00 PM
From: D. K. G.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2110

redherring.com Slander Netscape misrepresents its competition. By Blaise Zerega The Red Herring magazine From the March 1999 issue During the America Online/Netscape merger, the Red Herring was sent a confidential document written by Netscape (NSCP). The memo blasted Ariba Technologies' Operating Resource Management System (ORMS), a software suite used for online purchasing, claiming that Ariba's customers were "very unhappy," and touted the virtues of Netscape's own procurement applications. More specifically, it charged that Ariba's "scalability is low" (it said ORMS can handle only 20 concurrent users) and "deployability is very poor." In other words, Netscape was saying that Ariba implementations were going badly. But after thorough investigation, the Red Herring found the charges against Ariba -- whose CEO, Keith Krach, was one of our top entrepreneurs of 1998 (see "Pencil Pusher," July 1998) -- to be baseless. The document was forwarded to us by a self-described "unhappy Ariba customer" who claimed to have received it from a "reliable, solid source at Netscape." Was Netscape trying to spread misinformation about Ariba through the Red Herring? Or was the document sent by a genuinely disgruntled Ariba customer with a score of its own to settle? Netscape says that it was surprised that the document, intended for field representatives, would have been given to an Ariba customer. "Clearly, we would not encourage anyone to ship a document like this externally," says Steve Savignano, Netscape's general manager of application products. Regardless of whether the document was meant for customers' eyes, if Netscape's sales force was telling Ariba's customers this stuff, it was lying. With Sun's role in the AOL-Netscape deal, we wondered what would happen to Netscape's server technology. Concur Technologies is also gunning for Ariba. Will standardization come to the procurement market? Ariba was named best-managed in our top 50 private companies for 1998. The document described the supposed dissatisfaction of seven of Ariba's biggest customers, including Cisco Systems (CSCO), which uses ORMS as part of its highly regarded electronic commerce operation. According to Netscape, a Cisco IT director stated that if the company could turn back the clock two years, it would have selected a Netscape application server instead of Ariba's ORMS. But investigation revealed the opposite to be true. In October Cisco gave Ariba a supplier appreciation award. Carolyn DePalmo, a finance program manager at Cisco, says that ORMS functions very well and that it is processing nearly 3,000 purchase orders each month. Ms. DePalmo adds that 10,600 seats have been deployed and that the Ariba system handled more than $200 million's worth of transactions last year. We found several other allegations to be groundless. The memo said that another Ariba customer, Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD), had stopped deploying ORMS and was looking for an alternative. But Barbara Kuo, AMD's manager of procurement systems, denied this. "We are still in deployment and happy with Ariba," she told us. AMD plans to have most of its 10,000-person staff using ORMS by year-end. And although the document stated that Chevron was stopping payment to Ariba in protest and that Ariba's interfaces to SAP enterprise resource planning software were inoperable, Ariba's vice president of marketing, David Rome, says that Chevron's account is paid in full and that Ariba is an SAP-certified partner. Netscape declined to explain any of these discrepancies. "It's not a publicly released document so I can't comment on it," Mr. Savignano told us. Finger-pointing aside, the document's existence raises the issue of how difficult it is to install online procurement software, regardless of its developer. Bringing suppliers online can take between 6 and 18 months depending on the number of back-end systems to be integrated and the number of business rules to be incorporated into a front-end application. Perhaps Ariba's only misdeed is that its marketing team has been too successful at convincing companies of potential benefits without making them fully aware of installation complexities. "The Ariba management team is a very polished group of seasoned executives who all excel in customer relationships," says Roy Satterthwaite, an analyst at the Gartner Group, with pointed diplomacy. Indeed, the company continues to announce big-name customers -- including Federal Express, Lucent, and Visa -- while keeping Netscape and the rest of the competition at bay.