The Ariba SAP Mentor Moment
At SAP TechEd / Sapphire in Madrid today I bumped into an old friend of mine Achim Voermanek who used to work for SAP before he joined Ariba .
Big hello and “What are you doing here?”
Turns out he is back at Ariba and will be at their booth in Hall 10 or was it Hall 8?
He said: “Oh, you are doing the SAP Mentor stuff? You have to meet Joe Fox VP of Marketing and Strategy at Ariba, we talked about you just the other day.”
Joe: “So great to meet you. When the merger talks of Ariba and SAP started, I joined the SAP Mentor Monday call and it was amazing the frank and down to earth conversation that you were having during that call. I mean I only was on it as a guest, but I really liked it.”
I had totally forgotten that we once covered that topic on one of our SAP Mentor Monday Monthly calls, but once he mentioned it I remembered.
Once the merger plans were announced because of SCC rules SAP employees were barred from talking about it, but I realized, that as long as I don’t chime in, the SAP Mentors can speculate until the down of the days about what it means that Ariba is getting bought by SAP, and so we did. Frank direct analysis by Tridip Chakraborthy our resident SCM mentor, Jon Reed and others. We may dig up the recording.
It was really amazing to listen to the knowldgable folks in the trenches talking about possible future scenarios in that space. Really clarified things and opened my eyes into that area of the SAP business.
Another example of the power of the SAP Mentors: Trusted advisers that make sense of the latest SAP acquisitions.
Great start into this week in Madrid.
P.S. Joseph Fox told me that he just last week created his SCN profile and is going to blog about Ariba soon. We can’t wait.
Mark - Great to speak with you last night and learn more about the Mentors. I'll post a blog today about Business Networks and Ariba. Very pleased to be part of the SAP family and finding a warm welcome from all.
Welcome to the SCN community Joe. Love that you were able to come through with your promise to post your first blog: Ariba and the Business Network, Must have been tough to carve out the time last week during the conference in Madrid.
Hi Mark Finnern Mark
It was great to read this blog and thanks for mentioning the 2 calls that we had on the Ariba acquisition, prior to the acq. Thanks for calling me today as well.
I am thrilled that we have been talking to multiple Ariba folks and supporting Joseph Fox on the twitter SAPPHIRENOW time-line
As you rightly mentioned in your blog, we had spoken about this in detail in couple mentor calls
Call 1: We exchanged the views of the Ariba Supplier Network being the highlight of the acquisition
URl to the recording: https://sap.na.pgiconnect.com/p70945816/?launcher=false&fcsContent=true&pbMode=normal
Call 2: We discussed the overview with the ending remarks on the call about Ariba
URL to the recording:
https://sap.na.pgiconnect.com/p92652940/?launcher=false&fcsContent=true&pbMode=normal
Thanks for bumping into your ex-Ariba colleagues and already opening up the SAP Mentor platform to discuss Ariba in the days to come
I will work with Debbie, Josh, Andy Rubinson and loop you and Joe into the email thread to have a canned call on the Ariba topic once I'm done with the SAP Inside Track at Washington DC on Dec 7th 2012, where Emily Rakowski, herself or someone from Ariba, would do a session there
Cheers
Tridip