Ariba’s Digital Handshake Helps Caesars Drive Diversity Across its Supply Chain

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on how diverse buyers and sellers are using the Ariba Network to connect and collaborate in today’s digital economy.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Ariba, an SAP company.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect Podcast series, coming to you from the recent 2015 Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas.

Gardner

We're here to explore the future of business commerce. We'll learn how innovative companies are tapping into business networks to harness the power of communities, to discover, connect and collaborate with peers and partners across the street -- or around the world.

Not only are these leaders better managing their spend in buyer/seller interactions, they're also gleaning insights and intelligence to learn from the past, capitalize on the present, and chart an effective course for the future, all in real-time from a single platform.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Ariba-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.

Our next innovator case study focuses on Caesars Entertainment Corp. and how they're transforming supplier discovery in collaboration using cloud-based services and open business networks.

We’ll learn from Caesars how they drive an increase in diversity across their supply chain, and how that’s been accomplished using Ariba Discovery. We’ll hear first-hand how one supplier, M & R Distribution Services, has benefited from such supplier visibility.

Please join me now in welcoming our guests, Jessica Rosman, Director of Supplier Diversity and Sustainability at Caesars Entertainment based in Las Vegas. Welcome Jessica.

Jessica Rosman: Hi, thanks.

Gardner: And we're here also with Quentin McCorvey, Sr., President and COO of M&R Distribution Services, based in Cleveland. Welcome.

Quentin McCorvey, Sr.: Thank you.

Gardner: What are some of the more difficult aspects of finding the right supplier for the right job under the right circumstances?

Wider network

Rosman: Oftentimes, our portfolio managers look into their natural networks of suppliers we’ve already used or suppliers who have contacted us, but that can be limiting. Having a wider network or using the Discovery tool on Ariba has allowed us to open up to millions of different suppliers that we haven’t met before and who we might want to do business with us.

Rosman

Additionally, we do numerous outreach events into the communities in which we operate, so we can find top suppliers and include them in our supply chain.

Gardner: What sort of supplier requirements are there, and has that been changing over the years? Is there a moving target for this?

Rosman: For Caesars, it really depends on the category or commodity that we're searching for. Certain commodities may require larger supply chains or more integrated processes than others. But for all of our suppliers, we're looking for quality, service, and price. That may also include requirements around insurance, delivery time, or other needs to meet those three areas.

Gardner: People are familiar with the Caesars’ name, but your organization includes a lot more. Tell us about the breadth and scope of your company.

Rosman: Caesars Entertainment is the largest globally diversified casino network. We're also the home of Horseshoe, Harrah’s, Total Rewards, Paris, Rio, and obviously, the most famous, Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

Gardner: Quentin, tell us a little bit about M&R and why getting the visibility from folks like Caesars has been a good thing for you?

McCorvey

McCorvey: M&R Distribution Services, my company, was established in 2008 by my partner Joe Reccord and myself. I came out of banking and had experience and a background of 12 years in banking. My partner has been in the distribution business for over 20 years as a market leader in a regional distribution company. We're primarily focused on distributing products such as disposable gloves. Most maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) product lines are in our portfolio, as well as personal protective equipment and trash liners.

You asked how this has been important for us or how Caesars’ relationship has been important for us. It has been very important, because, as Jessica said, we found each other through some of their outreach events that they have in the community.

It was through a National Minority Supplier Development Council. My company is a nationally certified minority business. With this networking event and through a matchmaking event, I found someone on Jessica’s team, Bridget Carter, and learned a little bit more about Caesars and the opportunities that happened within Caesars. Then, through further connections, we had some opportunities that led to a strong relationship.

Gardner: What is it about making these connections between buyer and seller that’s easier today? What’s changed in the past several years?

It's about relationships

Rosman: Technology has changed, but some things haven’t changed. At the end of the day, business is about relationships. To start that relationship, there are new ways that we can meet different businesses by doing outreach and having the Ariba Discovery tool, where we can team up buyers and sellers through using Naics codes, UnPsc codes, or other types of codes. Using those, we can find those who want to sell and those who want to buy.

But part of it is the same as it has always been, which is about having that face-to-face connection, knowing that there is a potential relationship and feeling comfortable that that business will deliver on the quality, the service, and the need for the internal customer that there always has been.

Gardner: As to your title, Supplier Diversity and Sustainability, how important is that? How did that come about and what are your goals?

Rosman: Caesars Entertainment has a code of commitment. Our code of commitment is our code that says that we have a responsibility to the community, to the environment, to our customers, and to our employees to be the best that we can be. Under that code of commitment and in line with it is our Supplier Diversity Program. Our Supplier Diversity Program sits within our sourcing office, but also has a dotted line into the Diversity Department overall.

We are in unique areas across the country. When we do outreach within the community, in part it’s because in order for our businesses to grow, it’s important that we find community and local business partners that can meet the 24-hour, seven-days-a-week business that we have.

It’s different than other business types that have a delivery on Monday and don’t need it again until next week. That outreach has allowed us to find small, medium-size, and large businesses that are minority-owned, women-owned, veteran-owned, and other diverse businesses that can meet those needs.

Gardner: Quentin, tell me a bit about how long you’ve been working with Caesars? Is this strictly in Ohio with some of their properties there? Is it expanded across the company? Have you got a beachhead that’s then expanded? What’s the nature of the business you have?

While I didn’t win that opportunity, what I did win was the entrée into a relationship with Caesars.

McCorvey: We initially got engaged with Caesars, as I mentioned, through an outreach program, and through that, an opportunity came up for me to bid on a project with Caesars. Because I had bid on that project, I had to get connected to the Ariba Network. While I didn’t win that opportunity, what I did win was the entrée into a relationship with Caesars. Jessica talked about how a relationship is important, and for minority business, clearly, it’s really about relationship development.

As a minority-owned company, I'm not looking for handout. I'm looking for handshake, an opportunity to earn the business of a customer. I have to prove myself in being able to produce tier 1 pricing capacity and helping in solving pains within the supply chain network. Even with not getting this opportunity, I continued having conversations with Caesars and continued to develop the relationship.

Caesars has a mentoring program, which I was involved in and had the pleasure to become a part of. Through that mentoring program, I was able to sit down with Caesars and discuss certain goals that I wanted to accomplish, not only with my business personally, but also with the business opportunity with Caesars.

Some of those things included meeting the category managers in the categories where I was supplying into the organization and really understanding how to grow my key performance indicators (KPIs), not only directly, but also with Caesars and some of the other opportunities that are there.

Mentoring program

Through this mentoring program, we began to work on the relationship. I began to meet other people within the supply chain more regionally, as well as the national folks -- from Jessica and her team to up and down and across the Caesars organization. That’s been a very important process for me.

That's how we started out. I've gotten, and I'm going to get, opportunities through the mentoring program to start serving the company regionally. There are casinos in Ohio. My primary markets are servicing the Ohio casinos. Then, moving out of the region is a goal, ultimately growing into being a national supplier with all 52 properties within Caesars casinos.

Gardner: How important have Ariba Discovery and the Ariba Network been for you? How did you get on it? Was it easy? And where else have you been able to extend this visibility?

I actually won a couple of opportunities through the system and through the Ariba Network.

McCorvey: I got into the Ariba Network accidentally on purpose. On purpose because I had an opportunity to bid on a national contract with Caesars. When I had that opportunity, I got an invite from the buyer to sign up into Ariba. So I had to put my profile in there in order to bid on the opportunity that was available to me.

I did that, and it was a quick turnaround on the bid. I spent all of my time trying to figure out how to get through this, how to get my profile updated, and how to get the bid engaged.

I didn’t really know that much about the network and how connected the matches were to opportunities. I started seeing alerts and I started seeing, direct opportunities that really connected with my business. Through that, I said let me investigate a little bit further. And when I did, I began to look at some other opportunities. I actually won a couple of opportunities through the system and through the Ariba Network.

When I say "accidentally and on purpose," I guess it was fortuitous that we had this opportunity to bid. Even though it wasn't a win directly with that opportunity, it was a win for me and my company.

Gardner: Jessica, how about from the buyer side at Caesars, using the network, having the data, the insights, and the visibility. Has that added more value to your process? Obviously, you’ve got a certain specialization, but is there a more general value that you're seeing over time?

Rosman: We've used Ariba Network for a quite a while now. We started off with request for proposal (RFP) or the sourcing phase or module. We extended to the contracting phase or module and then we eventually went to the procure-to-pay.

We've seen a plethora of Ariba services, each one adding and building upon prior Ariba services that we had used. In all of those areas, it’s beneficial, because the lessons learned from a past RFP are archived and you can go back in and find RFPs that were used in the past.

When we're mentoring suppliers, especially within our Supplier Diversity Program, talking to minority or women suppliers, it helps us to know what some of the contract managers might be asking, or a little bit more about the categories. We don't pull the entire RFP. We don’t share all of those pieces, but unique items that might be applicable to future questionnaires. That goes all the way through to the procure to pay (P2P). It keeps it easy in one place and it archives the data for us.

Real standardization

Gardner: It sounds like you have a real standardization about how you are going about these things. Is that fair to say?

Rosman: Yes, I believe it is. Our sourcing team has evolved throughout this process to a category-driven leadership approach, and Ariba has been an integral part of that.

Gardner: Any thoughts or recommendations with 20/20 hindsight now for other organizations that are looking for specific requirements in the suppliers that they're targeting?

Rosman: As we continue to grow, Ariba also continues to grow in this area of supplier diversity. Using Ariba Discovery has also helped us when we're trying to find minority women or vendors in unique industries.

An example of that is also in Ohio. We were looking to find a women-owned or minority-owned company in that region that sells carbon dioxide. We put it into Ariba Discovery assuming that we wouldn’t find anybody that we hadn’t already met through our outreach events.

When you're looking for hard-to-reach vendors and looking for that opportunity and connection, it just takes it one step further.

We had done very extensive outreach events in the community and talked to more than 300 local vendors and yet we still were able to do find some. When you're looking for hard-to-reach vendors and looking for that opportunity and connection, it just takes it one step further.

Gardner: Quentin, I imagine that, as a business owner, you're curious about what new business opportunities are available. Has the visibility within the Ariba environment, seeing what alerts come across, seeing what the bids are about, led you to pursue other business opportunities and lines of business within your company? Has it helped you grow?

McCorvey: It has definitely helped us to grow. When I initially looked at the Ariba Network, I saw it as a procurement platform. But for me it's actually more of a supply chain accelerator, and I say that because as with any good business what's important is deal flow, how you get projects and opportunities in the pipeline.

Ariba has been a minimal level of inputs with a maximum level of outputs. So as a company and as a smaller growing company, you’re constantly looking at ways to grow opportunities, to grow market share. Do you invest $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 in a B2B website? Do you engage in Google Analytics? Do you put sales executives in other parts of the country to begin to grow?

Those are all the decisions you have to make every day with a limited amount of resources, because you really want to put that into growing your company. Ariba has has been able to do that. I don't necessarily have to have a larger sales team or some of the other things out there. I can begin to look at opportunities where I can grow my company in other markets. I can service those markets. It also gives me access to other Fortune 100 and 200 companies that I don't necessarily have the access to, to begin to look at.

A lot of ideas

What's important for me is to get a lot of ideas. Jessica talked a little bit about the archived RFPs. But really mining through those archived RFPs, I can see what companies are looking for, what their RFPs have been about, when are their sales cycles coming up again, when can I begin to look at those opportunities and target those opportunities, who are the purchasing and procurement managers that’s managing those lines.

That’s tough data to find. It’s tough to be able to find out who, for example, is procuring resins for a company. You can Google over their website, you can search for it, and you can’t find it, but you will never find that opportunity. It really, really closes down the sales cycle loop for me and gives me maximum value.

Gardner: Well, we're here at Ariba LIVE, and there's lots of news being made. We're hearing about integrated services for travel and expenses. We’re seeing more emphasis on the user experience, end-to-end processes that would end up in a mobile environment or any number of environments.

What's of interest to you? Where do you see yourselves taking advantage of some of these new technological and process innovations?

Rosman: One of the areas that's most interesting is learning about how to implement Ariba within your internal team and externally. We've done a great job of it within Supplier Diversity Program, but how do we roll that out further amongst our entire supply chain? The takeaway is how can we train internally and train externally to find results using Ariba?

It's worth spending some time really understanding how Ariba works and what are the components there within the system.

Gardner: Quentin, any thoughts about what’s of interest to you and then perhaps words of advice you could give other companies that are trying to improve their business using a business network?

McCorvey: Jessica hit on it again. Technology is really driving the market. My partner, who has been in the business for 25 years, often tells a story about how when he first started out. He left home every day with a pocket full of quarters and a pager. That day is gone. This is not your father's Oldsmobile. We really had to begin to leverage technology in a different way.

As a distributor, I'm looking at, and have been typically looking at, the sales side. How can I look at opportunities here? But what’s also been important for me to see and really learn is that I can look at it on the buy side. How can I not only find other manufacturing partners to begin to drive more cost out of my supply chain and even be more competitive in my business and my business environment.

Relative to advice for other customers, other people or other suppliers who are using the network, it's worth spending some time really understanding how Ariba works and what are the components there within the system. Ariba has some very knowledgeable account executives who work directly with you. You need to spend some time with your account executive to make sure that you update your profile to the point where you can get maximum amount of exposures to the maximum amount of hits.

To reiterate what I said before, it’s important to not only look at to the opportunities that are available to you, but closed opportunities, and see where you can begin to look at opportunities, and see if there are other business ideas or business partnerships that you can develop through the Ariba Network.

Gardner: Well, great. I am afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been learning about how supplier, discovery, and collaboration using cloud-based services and business networks helps to identify suppliers with specific qualifications and it’s also helping the seller organizations grow their business dramatically. So a big thanks to our guests.

We've been here with Jessica Rosman, Director of Supplier Diversity and Sustainability at Caesars Entertainment, and Quentin McCorvey, Sr., President and COO of M&R Distribution Services.

And a big thank you too to our audience for joining this special podcast coming to you from the recent 2015 Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Ariba-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions. Thanks again for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Ariba, an SAP company.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on how diverse buyers and sellers are using the Ariba Network to connect and collaborate in today’s digital economy. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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Ariba's Product Roadmap for 2015 Leads to Improved Business Cloud Services

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on what lies in store for Ariba and SAP, as the networked economy continues to expand.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Ariba, an SAP company.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect Podcast series, coming to you from the 2015 Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas.

Gardner

We're here to explore the future of business commerce. We'll learn how innovative companies are tapping into business networks to harness the power of communities, to discover, connect and collaborate with peers and partners across the street or around the world.

Not only are these leaders better managing their spend in buyer/seller interactions, they're also gleaning insights and intelligence to learn from the past, capitalize on the present, and chart an effective course for the future, all in real-time from a single platform.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Ariba-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.

Our next interview examines the future of commerce as seen by Ariba and provides a view into the innovations that the company plan for 2015 and beyond. Walking us through the Ariba product roadmap we're joined by Chris Haydon, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Ariba, an SAP company.

Welcome back to BriefingsDirect, Chris.

Chris Haydon: Thanks, Dana, nice to be here.

Gardner: Before we get to the Ariba news, what do you see as having changed, developed, or evolved over the past year or so in the business network market?

Haydon: It’s been a very interesting year with a lot of learning and adoption for sure. There's a growing realization in companies that the networked economy is here to stay. You can no longer remain within the four walls of your business.

It really is about understanding that you are part of multiple business networks, not just a business network. There are business networks for finance, business networks for procurement, and so on. How do you leverage and harness those business networks to make your businesses more effective?

Balancing needs

Gardner: So it’s incumbent upon companies to take advantage of all these different networks and services, the data and analysis that’s driven from them. But at the same time, they need to retain simplicity. They need to make their users comfortable with this technology. They need to move toward a more mobile interface.

Haydon

How do we balance the need for expansion, amid complexity, with simplicity and direct processes?

Haydon: It’s a difficult balance. There are a couple of ways to think about it as well. Just to pick up on the point on how businesses are changing, certainly the end-user expectation is dramatically changing. Whether it’s the millennials coming into the workforce, the nature of apps, mobile apps, in our personal lives driving the need, the requirement, the desire to have that in our business lives is there.

From an Ariba perspective, we believe our job is to manage complexity for our customers. That’s the value prop that people sign into. When we talk from a usability perspective about managing the complexity, it’s also about thinking about the individual persona or how the end-user really needs to interact to get the work done, how they can learn, and how they can use their different devices to work where they want and how they want.

Gardner: It seems to me that among the technology leaps that we are making in order to accommodate this balance is there a greater reliance on the network, network-centric attributes -- intelligence driven into the network. How do you view the role of the network in this balance?

Haydon: I think it’s fundamental, and we're definitely seeing it almost as a tipping point. It’s no longer just about the transactions, but about the trusted relationships. It’s about visibility into the extended value chain, whether that value chain is supply chain, financial payment chain, or logistics chain. It doesn’t matter what that process change or that value change is. It is insight into that trusted community, so you understand that it’s secure, that it’s scalable, and also that reliable and repeatable.

It’s no longer just about the transactions, but about the trusted relationships.

Gardner: It seems like we can put the word "hybrid" in front of so much these days. Tell us a little bit about why SAP HANA is so important to this network services tipping point. Many people think of HANA as a big data platform, but it’s quite a bit more.

Haydon: Yeah, it is. In Ariba we've made strides on leveraging the HANA Technology, first with the Spend Visibility program. The great message about HANA is that it's not HANA for technology sake; it’s how HANA enables different business outcomes. That's the exciting thing. Whether it's on the Ariba Network, whether we start in our analytical platform and have an average of 50X or 80X average improvement in terms of some of the reports, that’s great.

What was really interesting when we put HANA on to our Spend Visibility was that we got more users doing different types of reports because they could do this, they could iterate, they could change, they could experiment in a more interactive and faster way. We saw upticks in the behavior of how customers use their products, and that's the excitement of HANA.

Taking it to the next step, as we looked upon HANA across our network and our other applications in terms of better and different types of reporting in terms of the network and having real-time visibility in insights from our trusted community, it’s just going to provide a differential level of value to any of the end-users, whether they're buyer, seller or any of our partners.

Wider diversity

Gardner: So we have a wider diversity of network participants. We need to connect them. We’re leveraging the network to do that. We're leveraging the ability of a strong platform like HANA to give us analytics and other strong value adds, but we also need to bring that single platform, that single pane of glass value, to the mobile device.

User experience seems to be super important. Tell us a little bit about where you’re heading with that and introduce us to SAP Fiori.

Haydon: It’s a massive focus for us from an innovation perspective.

When we think about our user experience, it's not just about the user interface, albeit a very important part, but it's also the total experience that an end-user or a company has with the Ariba Suite and Business Network.

Fiori is an excellent user-interface design paradigm that SAP has led, and we have adopted, Fiori elements and design paradigms within our applications, mobile applications as well as desktop applications.

You will see a vastly updated user interface, based on Fiori design principles, coming out in the summer, and we'll be announcing that here at Ariba LIVE and taking customers through some really interesting demos. But, as you mentioned earlier, it's not just about the user experience. It's really about end users; we call them personas from a product perspective. You're in accounts payable or you're a purchasing officer. That’s the hat you wear.

It really is about how you link, where you work, work anywhere, embracing modern design principles and learning across the whole user experience.

It really is about how you link, where you work, work anywhere, embracing modern design principles and learning across the whole user experience. We've got some interesting approaches for our mobile device. Let me talk about the crossover there.

We're launching and showing a new mobile app. We launched our mobile app early this year for Ariba’s Procurement suite. I had some great uptick the first week, when 20 percent of our customers activated and rolled it out. Some of their end-users are progressively scaling that. Again, that's the power of a mobile-app delivery. It shows the untapped demand, the untapped potential, of how end-users do, can, and want to interact with business applications today.

At Ariba LIVE 2015, we are also announcing a brand-new application to enable shopping cart, adding, searching for the casual ad hoc end-user, so they can do their requisitioning and their owning of the contract items or ad hoc items wherever they are.

To finish off, just as excitingly, we're really looking to leverage the mobile device and take its abilities to create new user experience design paradigms. Let me give you an example of what that means. Let’s just say you're an accounts payable clerk and you're a very conscientious accounts payable clerk. You're on the bus, on the way to work, and you know you have got a lot of invoices to process. For example, you might want to say you need to process an invoice from ACME Inc. before you do it for my next supplier.

On your mobile device, you can’t process detailed information about an invoice, but you can certainly put it in your queue, and when you get to your desktop, there it is at the top of your to-do queue.

Then, when you finish work, maybe you want to push a report on "How did I do today?" You did x things, you did y things, and you have that on your mobile device on the train on the way home. That's the kind of continuity construct that would bring you in, making the user experience about learning and about working where you are.

Behavioral aspect

Gardner: Before we go into the list of things that you're doing for 2015, let's tie this discussion at the high level about the networked economy, power network, and intelligence driven in the network, the user interface, with this all-important behavioral aspect of users wanting to use these technologies.

One of the things that’s been interesting for me at Ariba LIVE is that I'm learning that user productivity is the go-to market. The pull of users that say they want these apps, they don't want the old-fashioned way, they want to be able to do some work on the train ride home and have notifications that allow them to push a business process forward or send it back.

So how do you see the future of the total technology mix coming to bear on that user productivity in such a way that they're actually going to demand these capabilities from their employers?

Haydon: It's interesting. Let's just use the example of a Chief Procurement Officer. As Chief Procurement Officer, you may have the old classic standard benefits of the total cost of ownership (TCO), cost reduction, and price reductions. But more and more, Chief Procurement Officers also realize that they have internal customers, their end-users.

If the end users can't adopt the systems and comply with the systems, what's the point?

If the end users can't adopt the systems and comply with the systems, what's the point? So, just getting to your point, it was an excellent thing. We're seeing the pull or the push, depending on your point of view, straight from the end user, straight through to the end-of -line outcome.

From an Ariba perspective, how this all comes together really is a couple things. User design interactions are foremost in our design thinking approaches. These different user design interactions make products do different things and work together. It also has some great impact on our platform, and this is where with SAP and HANA Cloud Platform gives us a differential way to address these problems.

One of these aspects here is to keep up with these demands not necessarily out of left field, but out of specific market or industry requirements.

We need to make sure that we can expand our ecosystem from an Ariba perspective to encompass partners and even customers doing their own things with our platform that we don't even know about. For some specific investments with HANA and the HANA Cloud Platform it's to make our network more open and we're also looking at some targeted extensibility scenarios for real applications.

Gardner: Let's go to the road map for 2015 Ariba products. Let's start with Spend Management. What's going on there?

A lot of innovations

Haydon: In 2014, we brought more than 330 odd significant features to market, almost one a day. So we have delivered a lot of innovation.

About 89 percent of those were delivered -- and this is important to our ongoing roadmap because we're cloud -- because we work with our customers in their own on-demand environment. They entrust their business processes to us. We're delivering more and more features in toggle mode -- or configured on or configured off. We're letting our end users and our customers consume our innovation even though it's intrinsic to the product.

That's one big improvement we made in 2014 and we want to carry through in 2015. In terms of spend management, again, we have some great new investment in Ariba. SAP continues to invest in Ariba, and we continue to turn out more innovation.

We have some innovation from enhancing capabilities to support the public sector. We're adding and extending in globalization capabilities. We're adding specific functionality to improve the security, the encryption, of applications.

We have 16-odd years of transactional history on the Ariba Network. We look at that in conjunction with our customers.

Then, there are some more targeted features, whether it's improving demand aggregation for our procurement applications, supporting large line levels and outsourcing and contract management applications, or improving our catalog searching capabilities with type-ahead and improved content and publishing management. It's really end to end.

Gardner: There are sort of four buckets within the spend management, indirect, contingent labor, direct, and supply chain management issues. The new big one was the Concur acquisition, travel and expense. Anything new to offer on understanding better spend management, better spend visibility, across these buckets?

Haydon: Of course. When we work with our customers, we have 16-odd years of transactional history on the Ariba Network. We look at that in conjunction with our customers. We see these big four major spend segments, indirect and MRO, as you mentioned, supply chain indirect, services, contingent labor, travel and expense, and, of course, the distribution of that spend type changes per industry.

But what we're really focused on is making sure that we can get end-to-end outcomes for our customers across the source-to-pay process. I'll touch on all of them in turn.

In indirect MRO we're just continuing to drive deeper. We really want to address specific features in terms of compliance and greater spend categories, specifically with Spot Buy, which is a product we are out there trialing with a number of customers right now.

In contingent labor and services management, we've done some excellent work integrating the Ariba platform with the Fieldglass platform, made some huge strides in linking purchase orders into the Fieldglass platform. Let Fieldglass do what they do great. They're the number one market leader in bringing the invoices back to the network over the common adapter.

In terms of direct and logistics and supply chain, we brought to market, like we mentioned last year, some direct materials supply-chain capability, co-innovating with a number of customers right now. We added subcontracting purchase order (PO) for complex scenarios in the summer and have done some great work in extending the capability to support consumer package and retail supplies.

Interesting strides

We've done some really interesting strides, and again, expanding the spend categories that we can support on there.

And last but not least, Concur. It's number one in travel, and we're excited to have that part of the family. Again, from an SAP perspective, when you look at total spend, there's just an unparalleled capability to manage any spend segment. We're working pretty closely with Concur to ensure we have tied integration and we work at how we can leverage their invoicing capability as a complement to Ariba's.

Gardner: Line-of-business applications is one of the things that's intrigued me here. Hearing your story unfold is this "no middleware, yet expansive integration -- end to end integration across business processes and data."

A resounding message from our customers . . . is that we need seamless, simpler integration between our cloud applications and our current applications.

So in this line-of-business category, explain to me how you can be so inclusive leveraging the technology. How does that work?

Haydon: Let me unpack that a little bit. A resounding message from our customers, particularly since the acquisition, is that we need seamless, simpler integration between our cloud applications and our current applications. Would they be on-premise?

I'll talk about Oracle and other clients in a little bit, but specifically for our SAP ERP systems, we’ve really worked hand in glove with our on-premise business-suite partners to understand how we can move from integrate to activate.

And so what we brought to market pretty significantly with the business suite is the ability for any SAP Business Suite customer to download an add-on that basically gives them an out-of-the-box connectivity to the Ariba Network. We continue to invest in that with S/4HANA upcoming, where we are planning to have native connectivity to the Ariba Network as part of a standard feature of S/4HANA.

For our other customers, the Oracle customers and other major ERP systems out there, we continue to invest in open adapters to enable their procurement and finance processes across the network or with any of our cloud applications.

Gardner: There's something that's always important. We leave it to the end, but we probably shouldn't -- risk management. It seems to me that you're building more inherent risk-management features inside these applications and processes. It's another function of the technology. When you have great network-centric capabilities and a solid single platform to work from, you can start to do this. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Emerging area

Haydon: This is a really exciting and emerging area. More and more leading-practice companies are starting to manage their procurement and their supply chains from a risk basis, the risk, the continuity of supply, security of supply. What happens if x, what happens if y? You eye your supply chain. If there is, heaven forbid, some contamination or whatever traceability issue somewhere in your supply chain, and you're a large company or even a small company, now you're held accountable.

How do we start helping companies understand the risk that exists within their supply chain? We think that the business network is the best way to make sense of the risk that exists in your supply chain. Why?

One, because it's a connected community; and two, because you think about the premise. We already have the transactions, 750 billion plus to spend. We already have a million plus trusted, connected relationships. But that's the first step.

We also think about where we can have differential inputs, third-party inputs, on types of dimensions, and we think it's these risk dimensions or domains of information that matter, whether it's safety, performance, innovation, diversity, environment, or financial risk. It could be any of these domains, whether it's information from Dun and Bradstreet, information from Made In A Free World, which has a global slavery index. Whatever these dimensions of information are, we want to bring them in to our applications in the context of the transaction, in the context of the end-user.

We think that the business network is the best way to make sense of the risk that exists in your supply chain.

Imagine when you do a sourcing event if you could be notified of some disruption or some type of risk in your supply chain before you finally award that sourcing event or before you finally sign the contract. That provides a differential level of outcome that can only really be delivered through a business network in a community.

Gardner: I'm afraid we have to leave it there. We're talking about the news at Ariba LIVE 2015 and also what to expect from both Ariba and SAP in the coming months. And we learned the way SAP and Ariba are working together to help innovate with companies and help them thrive in a networked economy.

So a big thank you to our guest, Chris Haydon, Vice President of Product Management for Ariba, an SAP company. Thank you, Chris.

Haydon: Thank you very much, Dana.

Gardner: And thanks to our audience for joining this special podcast coming to you from the 2015 Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Ariba-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Ariba, and SAP company.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on what lies in store for Ariba and SAP, as the networked economy continues to expand. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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Networks: The New Model for Business

Transcript of a discussion on how business networks are fast emerging as trusted, efficient hubs for cloud-based and data-driven commerce.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: SAP

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect. Our discussion today explores the role and impact of business networks, the often virtual assemblages of interrelated business services, processes, and data that are transforming how companies and consumers conduct commerce.

Gardner

These business networks are unlocking the ability for companies to extend processes and insights broadly and affordably to customers, suppliers, and other partners. Therefore, they're better able to engage with the participants across these networks in new and innovative ways.

We'll look at the historical record for how open markets and communities are rapidly changing business platforms. We'll see how today's consumer business models -- exemplified by Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb -- are extending to business-to-business (B2B) commerce, allowing buyers and sellers to find and know each other openly and accelerate B2B transactions and commerce efficiencies.

To learn more about the trends that are making business networks more powerful and more important than ever, please join me now in welcoming our guests.

We're here with Marshall Van Alstyne, Professor at Boston University School of Management and Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Digital Business. Welcome to BriefingsDirect, Marshall.

Marshall Van Alstyne: It’s a pleasure to be here, thanks for having us on-board.

Gardner: We're also here with Tim Minahan, Chief Marketing Officer SAP Cloud and Line of Business. Welcome back, Tim.

Tim Minahan: Thanks, Dana, it’s great to be here.

Gardner: Professor Van Alstyne, we've seen a great deal of network effects in business over the past decades. Yet nowadays, the confluence of cloud, mobile, and social and an emphasis on data-driven business processes seems to be accelerating and empowering these shifts. Some organizations call this the Third Platform. How does your research define business platforms, and how are the impacts from these Third Platform technology advancements newly impacting businesses?

Van Alstyne: I emphasize the network effect as one of the driving forces. Indeed, if we can create a positive feedback loop throughout the network effects, that’s where you see the efficiency in the scale happening so quickly.

Van Alstyne

In terms of a definition, we focus on two elements of the platform. The first is an open architecture that third parties can build upon.

The second is the governance rules. How is it that people can participate? Why would they participate? How do you share the profits? How do you resolve conflict? You think about it as a nexus of rules and architecture. If you can put those two things together, you can probably grow an ecosystem that helps to foster and stimulate some of those network effects.

Gardner: Tim Minahan, SAP has been a pioneer inside the four walls of the enterprise over the years with enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other business applications. Now, it seems as if you're recognizing what Professor Van Alstyne has been describing with these network effects and extending your value and business insight and processes across multiple boundaries, outside the four walls of any given enterprise into entire ecosystems.

Next productivity wave

Minahan: Absolutely, Dana. At SAP, we truly believe that the next wave of business productivity is not going to come just within enterprises, but between them. Forty years ago, when SAP arguably invented the whole concept of ERP, businesses were operating much, much differently.

Minahan

We showed them a new way to automate their internal information and process flows, but they were organized in a much more vertically oriented fashion. The employees would graduate from college, spend 40 years with the company, get the gold watch, and retire.

Companies owned most of their infrastructure, their manufacturing facilities, their inventory, their shipping fleets, but certainly this is not your father's business environment anymore. In part, this was accelerated by the recession that we're still emerging from. Companies are less vertically integrated than they were in the past.

They've adopted more variable operating models. They've outsourced everything from manufacturing to customer service, and they need to reach and compete with companies across the street and on the other side of the world. And this is creating new opportunities, as well as new challenges, for businesses today, and it’s increasing demands and expectations on individual functions of their teams.

You're seeing it everywhere. If you have an iPhone, look on the back. It’s designed in California by Apple, but it's built, shipped, and serviced by someone else entirely. Even beyond the physical device, Apple makes most of its revenue from network-based services. iTunes relies heavily on an ecosystem of mobile carriers and artists and studios.

Now, we're seeing this move into the business world, in which companies need to rapidly organize this virtual enterprise, all these resources of employees, manufacturing capacity, logistics, delivery capacity, and customer service to take advantage of certain market opportunity. Or, they need to adapt very quickly to certain market changes, and the only real way to do that is through a digitally connected network of partners, customers, and supply chain.

Gardner: Professor Van Alstyne, this is a tricky time for companies. It seems that they want to retain what works, the business models that have been tried and proven for them. They like having big margins, of course, but in order to grow and to be part of the future they need to expose themselves to these networks, take some risks, maybe lose margin in the process, but perhaps get scale and automation as a payback.

How do you view that? How do you see companies adjusting? Is this a cultural thing where some companies will take this plunge and others don't? It does seem to be a perilous time for companies. I hope they're not just freezing in the headlights.

Van Alstyne: It’s a great question. There are a couple of elements and they vary based on the where the company is currently. If it’s a relatively virgin market, then it’s fairly straightforward for them to invite others in, create the platform, and expand out in that direction. If it’s an existing market for them, they really have to worry about managing the cannibalization question.

I know SAP has also had a very interesting example of that, as you move from on-premise services to hosted services. They're doing a nice job of managing that migration. It’s a little bit tricky in terms of how much you expand the market, but you really need to. You have to realize that the scale, the innovation, the customer engagement happens on these business platforms. Long-term, one really doesn't have a choice.

Platforms vs. products

One of the arguments that we typically make is that even weak platforms tend to beat very strong products. You can look at any number of examples, whether you take a look at the Blackberry, the Sony Personal PlayStation gaming device, or the Garmin device for GPS.

All of these functions are effectively absorbed into the platform. If you manage a platform ecosystem, where third parties can add value on your behalf, you'll grow faster. The platforms almost always will be products. So, in the long-term, companies don't have a choice. They have to move in this direction.

Gardner: So if it’s inevitable that you have to change, it sounds to me from what I've seen at SAP, that they're recognizing this. They're dealing with it themselves as a company, but they're trying to put together a safe path for enterprises to expand into the networked economy. At the same time, they can have trusted partners for automating a lot of the behind-the-scenes activity and allowing them to still function within their business verticals to know what their intellectual property is and to extend to it.

Let’s go back to Tim. Am I reading that right, Tim, that SAP is trying to be, in a sense, the arbiter between risk and exploration when it comes to the networked economy?

Minahan: That’s an accurate depiction, Dana. Think about our personal lives. Whether we're engaging family and friends on Facebook, buying a book or a blender on Amazon, or trying to capture transportation services to get downtown during rush hour on Uber, we're experiencing the scale and simplicity and convenience of personal networks.

At SAP, we believe that solving this inter-enterprise collaboration challenge is one of the biggest opportunities of our era.

We run our daily lives on them now. Unfortunately the business world traditionally has been optimized within the four walls of the enterprise. Companies have invested billions over the past 20 to 30 years in re-engineering their processes and investing in systems to really automate those internal processes and information flows.

They have created what have become islands of efficiency that work very well, and continue to work well, for those that are highly vertically integrated, but very few are, as we talked about earlier.

At SAP, we believe that solving this inter-enterprise collaboration challenge is one of the biggest opportunities of our era. We feel that we're well positioned to do that and have been assembling some of these business networks. We've had the acquisition of Ariba and Fieldglass in the area of contingent workforce and, with Concur, now in the area of travel and expense.

We're complementing that with network extensions of our own, both through the addition of things like the product sustainability network, which leverages the existing connections within the network to help companies better perform tracing and trackability of their products, and the financial services network, which really facilitates and aids payment.

What we're looking at is an opportunity to extend existing IT infrastructure and business process outside the four walls of the enterprise in the most scalable and efficient way possible, no matter what systems a particular company or their trading partners use, all through a single integration point.

Integration adapters

Think about Amazon in your personal lives. You don’t worry about integrating tier trading partners or how you are going to sell that. Amazon takes care of that for you. That’s the same metaphor that we're attempting to carry through into the business world by providing single standard integration adapters or on-ramps to the network that allow you to manage this virtual enterprise in a highly transparent and highly efficient manner.

Gardner: Professor, you mentioned something about the very nature or definition of an enterprise changing. As we look to cloud computing and to these network effects, the ability to outsource so much of what a company does is based on the best value. If doing it internally makes more sense, you do it internally. If going external makes the most sense, you go external. We see this with computing. Hybrid cloud is pretty much about that.

We're also seeing a change in the workforce with contingency and part-time work. What is the new corporation about? It seems it’s mostly rules, relationships, collaboration and management. Let’s go to Tim first. As the very nature of corporations change, it's really about relationships, data, and feedback loops. The data-driven organization, is it really about that. Are we losing something, are we gaining something, or both, Tim, as we seek this new definition of a corporation.

Minahan: Yeah, I think as Professor Van Alstyne said, we're entering an age where the borders between enterprises are being taken down. Companies are moving toward a model where they're managing pools of resources, whether that’s pools of talent around expertise, as you just indicated Dana.

A third of a typical workforce is no longer on the company payroll. It's contingent, statement of work (SOW) workers. In some industries, it’s already more than half. This is fastest growing part of the workforce. HR executives, and I talk with many of them, are beginning to rethink what constitutes the workforce and are looking at pools of talent.

A third of a typical workforce is no longer on the company payroll. It's contingent, statement of work (SOW) workers.

They need to understand where the skill sets lie, not necessarily what roles someone plays today, what skills they have had in the past and be able to, when a particular opportunity or project arises, assemble that expertise very quickly to address that particular project, and disassemble them just as fast, but retain the knowledge within the enterprise for the next time that comes up.

The same thing is true if you're organizing a supply chain and need to be able to serve a new market like China. Where do you put your manufacturing? How do you address distribution, value-added taxes, and customer support. Traditionally, the model would have been to go and establish your own manufacturing facilities, build your own local agents, but no longer.

Now you can quickly assemble and address, or test, a particular market or test a particular product in any given market. Should it work, scale it up. Should it not, scale it down and move on. Networks allow you to achieve this.

I wanted to go back to something that Professor Van Alstyne said that's critically important. I fully agree that the networks go through phases. The first phase is to connect all the various parties, whether they be people, businesses, merchants, banks or all of the above.

The second part is to automate their existing processes. What gets really exciting, once you've automated these processes, once you have these parties collaborating or transacting its scale, are the new insights and entirely new services you could enable.

Transactional information

Once you have these millions of companies or people transacting at scale, you can see the transactional or relationship information. It could be the generated content that helps all members of the community make more informed decisions whether it's about buying or whether it’s about, should I bid on a particular bit of business as a seller or as a bank, mitigating risk in lending to allow them to understated who the buyer is, who the seller is and what their traditional history is.

That is the ultimate big data opportunity, when you have these networks operating at scale. We're beginning to deliver this networked intelligence in the form of insight services to help our members of the communities make important buying, selling, and financing decisions in ways that they couldn’t before.

Van Alstyne: Dana, let me jump in for a second. One of the things that Tim just said is quite important. One of the most interesting elements of the platform is the extent for new business services and new products to emerge. One of the Silicon Valley descriptions of the platform is that you know you have one when your community takes it in a direction you didn't expect.

One of the most interesting elements of the platform is the extent for new business services and new products to emerge.

You need to have made it possible for that. The underlying architecture needs the support the ability to develop something new that wasn't expected, but that’s one of the ways the platform adapts to create new value.

The communities start to add new value and new services in ways that the platform meets the needs of the ecosystem, so it’s this ability to turn out new sources of value based on the underlying architecture. This is one of the key distinctions of platforms that really do add value.

Minahan: I totally agree with that. We've only just entered it into this networked economy or networked era. One of the most exciting things is that it allows you to begin to entirely rethink traditional business models that were organized in an era where, to use an economic term, transaction costs were extremely high.

Look at Uber, what Uber has done, and the challenges we're now seeing around challenging the traditional medallion livery service. That was organized out of a very real concern around safety and issues, but over time, that model matured and unfortunately got very costly.

What you saw were the medallions being aggregated in the hands of a small few who could afford them. That obviously had some implications on the level of service and cost of service to employers. Now we've removed all of the transaction costs and could add up efficiently match demand -- i.e. you as the traveler -- and supply literally anyone that is a card-carrying member of the Uber service.

That’s an entirely new business model that is fundamentally challenging hundreds of old rules and thoughts about what it means to hail a cab. So let me toss in one additional principle that’s often used for design. I'm thinking exactly of the Uber example.

One of the best ways to view a platform is that you have the best platform and the transaction cost are the lowest. If you can get those lowest transactions, you're going to get more business taking place on that platform. So do whatever you can to see if you can lower those transaction costs to get the business going.

Looking for signs

Gardner: So we've taken a look at the inevitability of these networks. We've seen them already very prominent in the business to consumer (B2C) space, consumer activities, and commerce. We’ve recognized that openness is important. So we have innovation. We also recognized the importance of governance and management.

So how do we know when we've done this correctly? Is there a sign? Professor Alstyne, you've mentioned a few that describe powerful and successful networks. Do enterprises have to view themselves differently? Do they need to look at participants in their network as a metric rather than just margin and net in gross revenues and incomes? Is there a way to be successful?

Van Alstyne: Platform businesses behave differently than traditional businesses. Silicon Valley had been using lot of these metrics for engagement. How many new users do you get, and how engaged are they with the platform? It’s a wonderful place to start. Let me give you three rules that we like to use for platform design that actually help get the system running smoothly.

One of them is "frictionless entry." You would like to make it as easy as possible for people to get onboard your platform. It doesn’t matter if that user is on the developer side. You want folks to be able to enter the platform as easily as possible.

If you're bringing in apps in your ecosystem, your users are going to get a bad experience if they are low-quality apps.

The next one is that you need to manage "riskless quality." If anyone can participate, there's a danger that folks who actually get onto the platform don't necessarily add value or they may try to siphon off value. You may worry about lower quality. Atari fell apart as a platform when it got low-quality games on it. Uber has to worry about low-quality drivers. If you're bringing in apps in your ecosystem, your users are going to get a bad experience if they are low-quality apps. So you still need to have riskless quality.

The first principle is frictionless entry, and you need to manage riskless quality from the users on that side.

The third one is "permissionless innovation." You don't want your developers to necessarily have to come to you to get permission. There is always this danger because you own the platform. You have enormous power over them and you could simply take that idea and run with it. You need the ecosystem partners to be able to run with an idea and create something novel on their own and let them have that value. They don’t need to get permission first.

These are three rules that we use for design -- frictionless entry, riskless quality, and permissionless innovation. Those are really good guidelines and are helping to get these ecosystems to grow quickly, get more users onboard, and get your value add from third party participation.

Gardner: Tim Minahan at SAP Cloud, tell us a bit about what you're doing at SAP, some of your acquisitions, besides your cloud, this ability to be frictionless and help people come on the network easily. You recently finished up the Concur acquisition, one of your largest ever. Explain how you're growing the size of your network?

Application agnostic

Minahan: What Professor Van Alstyne just talked about are principles that we subscribe to. In a business network sense, it also requires you to be open and application agnostic and largely agnostic to the on-ramps. That’s part of the frictionless entry.

So regardless of what system you are using, whether it’s SAP, Ariba, Concur, Oracle, PeopleSoft Info, etc., you need to be able to attach the systems to the network, those demand systems that allow you to connect and collaborate through the network to extend that business process and engage with your customers, suppliers, and other partners.

Think about our personal lives, whether it’s Uber or Amazon, those networks that are most powerful and most impactful on our personal lives allow a seamless process. You don’t even think about the process, but it is end to end.

In the case of Amazon you don’t think about the buying process -- how am I going to connect to those individual merchants? They're already connected for you. Ultimately, you believe you're buying from Amazon, but you might be buying from an independent provider and they are still delivering to you.

Those networks that are most powerful and most impactful on our personal lives allow a seamless process.

Likewise, you don't think about, gee, now that I have placed the order, do I have to call my bank to settle out? No, that’s handled for you, SAP has been using these guiding principles to go out and make sure that we're building the network appropriately, both in our organic means through innovation and the introduction of new services, like payments, financing, and dynamic discounting, both independently with other members and financial institutions of the network, as well as inorganically through acquisitions.

Gardner: As we close out, we've determined that the number of participants and the value of the commerce is super important in these networks. Several times we've also touched on this feedback loop in the data. So as we look to the future, we might have  competing networks. If we assume that those networks are going to have some frictionless ability to move on and off of them, then the best network is where people will go.

Is the best network the one that provides the best insights in data? Can we close out our discussion by looking at the importance of shared data and analysis and the ability to counter that analysis up from these transactions as a differentiator going forward that will pick winners and losers in open commerce network environment, if you will.

Let’s go to Professor Van Alstyne first. Who is going to win in this network environment and is the data and openness and availability of analytics going to be a major determinant of that?

Van Alstyne: I am going to argue the best platform is the one that creates the most value over time and that probably means that the data analytics, those that can use the data to create these data-driven feedback loops, will be the winners.

One of the things that I want to emphasize is that frictionless entry and the ability of the movement of data doesn’t necessarily mean that switching costs are going to be low or that it’s going to be easy to necessarily change networks. Network effects do create winner-take-all markets, they do create these behemoths. Google Search has 67 percent market share in the US and 90 percent in Europe. Facebook has 1.3 billion users. I think Amazon web services has a huge proportion of the cloud services.

We need to be careful if we think we're going to be able to switch networks easily. There are going to be some very substantial winner-take-all networks and some concentration at the top. Cloud and data is going to be an integral part of that, as the data creates these data-driven feedback loops that support these network effects.

Data and analytics

Gardner: Tim, our last word to you on the role of data and analytics as the determinant of the most valuable network.

Minahan: I agree with the professor that the key litmus test of who wins is the platform or the network that creates the most value, and I think value comes in a few flavors.

Number one is relevancy. Are my trading partners there? At SAP, typically about half of any given company's trading partners are already connected in transacting. That makes the frictionless entry that much easier. Think about Facebook. Why would you join any other personal network when most of your friends and family are already there.

The second is the aspect of value. Can I manage most of my collaborations in a single environment or do I need to join multiple networks in order to complete a transactional process? The more capabilities you can layer in to make it more convenient for all members of the network to collaborate, the more value add.

The more capabilities you can layer in to make it more convenient for all members of the network to collaborate, the more value add.

And third, I believe that we've only scratched the surface on these insights. I wouldn’t even say that it’s a two-sided model. It’s a multi-sided model, where once you get these parties collaborating at scale, the transactional relationship and community-generated content can deliver new insights to help folks make more informed decisions, whether it's, which trading partners to do business with or which areas of your existing supply chain might be presented with risk in the future and you need to adapt quickly or which financial settlement options you have to settle out to help you optimize cash flow.

These are new insights that were previously impossible with traditional on-premise and point-to-point integration models and it can only be accomplished in a network model.

Gardner: Very good. I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast discussion on business networks. You've heard how open markets and communities are rapidly changing business platforms, allowing sellers and buyers to find and know each other openly and therefore accelerating B2B transactions and commerce efficiencies.

And we have heard how companies can exploit business networks to automate and analyze how they transact commerce in new innovative ways.

So a big thank you to our guests, Marshall Van Alstyne, Professor at Boston University School of Management and Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Digital Business. Thank you so much, Marshall.

Van Alstyne: Dana, thanks so much for allowing us to participate.

Gardner: We also like to remind our listeners that there will be a new book called "Platform Strategies" out in 2015 from Professor Alstyne and co-authors.

Also a big thank you to Tim Minahan, Chief Marketing Officer, SAP Cloud and Line of Business. Thank you, Tim.

Minahan: Thank you, Dana, a great conversation.

Gardner: And a thanks to our audience as well for joining us for this discussion. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Don't forget to come back next time for more BriefingsDirect.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: SAP.

Transcript of a discussion on how business networks are fast emerging as trusted, efficient hubs for cloud-based and data-driven commerce. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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