Throughout last week PayStream participated in Ariba LIVE from Las Vegas, Nevada. This blog is part of a series detailing our experiences from analyst briefings, one-on-one sessions with SAP and Ariba representatives, and keynote and breakout sessions at this highly informative and entertaining conference.
The Ariba Network is a powerful B2B commerce tool that connects buyers and sellers. Organizations that utilize the Ariba Network further automate their billing and payment processes by importing network transactions directly into other Ariba solutions such as AribaPay or Ariba Invoice Management.
During their roadmap discussion attended by PayStream analysts, Ariba highlighted several areas in which the Ariba Network would see improvements in 2014. These included deeper collaboration between Ariba and SAP, increasing seller value, increased globalization, and improved infrastructure.
Deeper collaboration between SAP and the Ariba Network means platform consolidation and spot quote functionality. The ability to invoice service companies through mobile devices is also on the horizon. Ariba plans to increase the reach of the Ariba Network to include Brazil, Russia, China, Columbia, and Chile and maintain government compliance along the way with the use of archiving extensions and local 3rd party tax integrators.
Ariba plans to increase the value to Network sellers by providing richer profiles to generate more leads, predictive sales functionality and spot quote matching capabilities. The Ariba Network will also be moved onto the HANA platform, for more info on this see Part 2 of this sequence.
One of the most memorable experiences from Ariba LIVE this year was the keynote session from Bert Jacobs, one of the co-founders of the Life is Good company. Jacobs told the story of how his company went from his brother and he selling t-shirts (and living) out of a van to an enterprise with 11 million in revenues in 2013. His company is founded on the principle that humans are naturally optimists; we desire to see the positive side of life and hence “life is good.” Jacobs’ mother would ask her children every night at dinner to describe one positive thing they achieved that day. This was but one of the many things that inspired Bert to create a t-shirt, a brand, an enterprise, and a charitable foundation.
In Bert Jacobs’ speech, he shared that once his company started to take off, Bert started to receive lots of fan mail, predominantly from children. These children were often overcoming life-changing or traumatic events and the Life is Good branding and ideology gave them hope and helped them cope with grief and tragedy. He shared one of these letters with the audience (see 
picture below). I won’t go into the details so that you can remain dry-eyed at your office (unlike half of the Ariba LIVE audience in the Chelsea ballroom). The letter told a story of two young twin brothers who relied on each other’s strengths to remain positive and optimistic about life and the inspiration they attained from the Life is Good ideology.
It was stories such as this one that led Bert to realize that optimism starts in your childhood. He started a foundation, Life is Good Playmakers, to help troubled kids have fun because having fun and the possibility of having more fun is the foundation of a life-long optimistic attitude. Life Is Good Playmakers uses teachers, social workers, and child life specialists to help children overcome poverty, violence and illness. These “playmakers” use the power of play to build healing, life-changing relationships with the children in their care. To date more than 310,000 children have been cared for by Playmakers throughout the United States and Haiti and the foundation continues to raise millions via 10 percent of all Life is Good revenues.
I suppose the takeaway from this speech was that the most productive and successful people and 
organizations are the most optimistic ones. With procurement and purchasing it is especially important to be optimistic about improving processes and the power of SAP and Ariba’s solutions will foster that improvement. There may have been frisbees thrown at the crowd.
