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Dana Gardner

Ariba steps up cloud efforts with StartContracts, on-demand contract management for SMBs

By Dana Gardner | May 18, 2010, 8:07am PDT

Summary: Effective contract management is a “critical lever” that companies can pull to find contract information, optimize profits, identify risks and opportunities quickly.

Ariba, the spend and procurement management solutions provider, hopes small- to mid-sized businesses will take their enthusiasm for cloud computing to the business processes around contract management.

Ariba’s latest solution, StartContracts, works to do just that. An on-demand solution, StartContracts combines technology and best practice processes to help organizations manage buy and sell side agreements with greater speed and lower costs. The solution also promises to mitigate risk, drive compliance and increase revenue, says Ariba. [Disclosure: Ariba is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Those are tall promises, but ones that Steve Markle, senior director of Solutions Management at Ariba, is willing to stand by. As he sees it, effective contract management is a “critical lever” that companies can pull to find contract information, optimize profits, identify risks and opportunities quickly.

Here’s what you get with this new software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution:

Create a central, online contract repository
Specify important fields and terms within agreements to be monitored
Manage contracts across the organization using robust free-text search and reporting capabilities
Establish task-driven reminders based on important dates and milestones to drive use and compliance
Go paperless and sign agreements electronically
Optional electronic signature capabilities streamline and make contract execution more affordable and more secure

Ariba is billing StartContracts as affordable, enterprise-class software that is delivered on demand. Markle went so far as to say that the solution makes possible capabilities that were once only affordable for large enterprises. How affordable? The company is offering an introductory price of $199 a month.

Like a lot of cloud services, this may take hold in SMBs, but migrate into departments and then more of the enterprise core. And, as with most SaaS and cloud services, contract management as a service can quickly become a dynamic process ingredient for more transformative efficiencies. I expect that the analytics from these pure services-composed processes will also prove quite powerful.

BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jleclaire and http://www.jenniferleclaire.com.

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Topics

Contract Management, Ariba Inc., On-demand, Small And Medium Business, Service Management, Software As A Service (SaaS), Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing, Emerging Technologies, Dana Gardner

Dana Gardner is president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, an enterprise IT analysis, market research, and consulting firm.

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Dana Gardner

Dana Gardner is president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, LLC, a New Hampshire-based IT analysis and new media content production and consultancy firm that he founded in 2005. He produces a series of podcast/videocast/transcript/blog content shows, called BriefingsDirect[tm/sm], some of which are sponsored and which he blogs on. Such sponsored shows are declared individually as such and by what organization or company. When Dana blogs on ZDNet on companies that he does have, or has had, consulting and/or sponsorship relationships, he declares that in each blog entry. There is no connection between the negotiation of such sponsorships and the opinions expressed by Dana here on ZDNet. To date, the following organizations/companies have sponsored, or do sponsor, some BriefingsDirect content, or have consulting relationships with Dana: Active Endpoints Akamai Technologies Aster Data Systems BP Logix Business Technology Quarterly CA Compuware Electric Cloud Genuitec Gerson Lehrman Group Greenplum Hewlett-Packard iTKO JustSystems North America, Inc. Kapow Technologies LogLogic Nexaweb Technologies, Inc. The Open Group Paglo Panda Security Platform Computing Progress Software rPath Sailpoint Splunk TIBCO Software Weblayers Workday WSO2 ZDNet As a matter of CNET Networks and Interarbor Solutions policies, when Dana covers an organization that is also a sponsor of a BriefingsDirect-produced podcast, videocast or any other content, a disclosure will be included with the coverage. Updated (1/4/2010): Instead of providing a disclosure on just those editorials (blog posts, etc.) that intersect the above listed companies, we have changed the policy to include a link to this full disclosure at the end of every one of Dana's blog posts. In the case of audio or video-based coverage, such disclosures will be provided within the editorial content itself.