I’m in the process of listening to Ariba’s earnings call (always a good gauge of the overall market) and plan to report on a number of the specifics early next week, along with the recent quarterly — and yearly — performance of Ariba competitors including Emptoris, Basware and Hubwoo (all of which also came out with results this week). In short, regarding Ariba, most of the news appears solid, if not decent. Ariba slightly beat expectations if you discount special items and there even appears to be glimmers of hope on the horizon on the consulting front — Ariba bombed out in sourcing consulting last year relative to some competitors — as well. Here are some basic numbers quoted verbatim from their press release:
– Total revenues of $85.7 million
– GAAP EPS of $0.03 and non-GAAP EPS of $0.19 per fully-diluted share
– Subscription software revenue of $41.2 million, up 15% year-over-year
– 12-month subscription software backlog of $139 million, up 10% year-over-year
– Cash flow from operations of $10.5 million, ending cash and investments of $199.5 million
– On-demand deals up 76% year-over-year
On the call, Bob Calderoni, Ariba’s CEO, tried to tie some general trends in business at the moment (e.g., relying more on supply partners) to Ariba’s growth and SaaS traction. And Bob raised the competitive mantra as he so often does, citing two takeaway wins from SAP and Oracle, including a “multi-year source to pay win with a global transportation company” who was “a large Oracle shop ‘frustrated with custom configured solutions'”. He also cited the case of Mass Mutual, who was another “suite win,” in this case over SAP. Mass Mutual ripped out “SAP EBP” and went with Ariba for “sourcing and software services, P2P and invoicing and dynamic discounting to optimize cash management.”
