Ariba

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Ariba NASDAQ: ARBA is an enterprise software and information technology services company, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, USA. It is publicly traded. The focus of their products and services is cost savings in procurement via electronic commerce, also known as spend management.

Ariba was co-founded on September 17, 1996 under the original name of ProcureSoft, Inc., by Keith J. Krach, Paul Hegarty, Edward P. Kinsey, Robert D. Lent, Boris Putanec, Paul Touw and Robert J. DeSantis. Co-founders Keith J. Krach, Edward P. Kinsey, Paul Touw and Robert J. DeSantis has previously worked together at Rasna, Inc., a Silicon Valley software company located in San Jose. These four individuals, along with Paul Hegarty, were working on the idea for what became Ariba in the offices of Benchmark Capital in Menlo Park. Separately, Robert D. Lent and Boris Putanec were working on a similar idea in the offices of CrossPoint Venture Partners in Woodside, California. Crosspoint partner John Mumford introduced Putanec and Lent to the five others and the team found synergies that led to the combination of the two efforts to form one company.

When the founding team of Ariba (then Procuresoft) came together they combined all respective disciplines that are required to form the basis of a strong company including; executive leadership, sales management, business development, strategic planning, financial engineering, object oriented programming and software engineering and marketing. This synergistic core strength allowed Ariba to quickly focus on what prospective customers were seeking in the new market of Business-to-business (B2B) elctronic commerce.

From the very beginning of Ariba, CEO Keith Krach enforced a strong customer focused culture. Before the company had any customers they held customer summits that they titled Customer Advisory Boards. In the first of these meetings the Ariba team worked with the customer prospects in attendance to understand their needs for the automation of their business-to-business electronic commerce transactions. It's reported that the Ariba team also talked to more than 100 of the Fortune 500 companies before they developed the specifications for their first product. This is likely the reason why Ariba's products were highly demanded and why the company quickly became the leader in this market space and has always maintained this leadership.