- 03
- JUN
- 2010
Ariba and Salesforce integration announcement is imminent
Author: Mark Perera - Categories: Technology & Apps
Ariba (ARBA) will be shortly announcing its first point of integration between its new Commerce Cloud and the Salesforce.com (CRM) Sales Cloud. The integration will link Ariba Contracts with Salesforce.com's Contracts module, allowing both parties to have full visibility over their commercial relationships.
The Ariba team dropped some teasers about the integration at last week's AribaLive user conference in Orlando (US), but the official announcement will not be made until later in the month. In advance of this announcement, I was able to get Tim Minahan, Ariba's Chief Marketing Officer, to give some comments on the integration.
"As our continued focus to add equal value to our seller customers and expand our leadership position in the contract management space, we have aligned with Salesforce to integrate Ariba Contracts - the market leading enterprise contract management system - with Salesforce.com, the market leading CRM system. This empowers customers to create and manage customer commercial relationships and agreements with a fully automated and integrated process. This means faster sales cycles, lower cost of sales, and accelerated revenues."
"Why? Because our customers asked for it. In fact, industry research found that 60% of sales and legal organisations say the biggest impediment to efficient contract management is lack of integration into their CRM system. Two market leaders are coming together to solve this challenge."
This refers back to our initial prediction back in March that this will add the ability of Salesforce.com users to track contracts via the new Chatter capability, which provides Twitter-like functionality within CRM. We are also expecting further integration between Ariba and Salesforce.com later in the year, with the probable timing of this being Salesforce.com's Dreamforce event in December.
The point of integration between the two companies that will be of the biggest impact for the business world will be when the Ariba Discovery/Network talks to Salesforce, matching Ariba's buying community with Salesforce's 77,300-strong sales organisation, allowing buyers to find new suppliers and build commercial relationships and visa versa – the eharmony of the business world.
News of the Salesforce integration follows Ariba's recent announcement of their intention to integrate Ariba Discovery with LotusLive to assist in the collaboration between commerce partners.
I will be catching up with the Ariba team next week at the European leg of AribaLive, so will keep you updated.
