The stock market liked the acquisition and the price of Ariba's shares rose from $57 at the time of the announcement to $173 at closing on March 9, 2000, which also marked the peak of the Internet Bubble. Tradex was the leader in the nascent Digital Marketplace Software field. On December 17, 1999, Ariba announced it would acquire Atlanta-based Tradex Technologies in a stock swap valued then at $1.86 billion. With the bursting of the dot-com bubble, Ariba's stock price fell dramatically in July 2001 to its IPO level, where it remained for the rest of its life as an independent company. In 2000, the stock value continued to climb, and Ariba's market capitalization was as high as $40 billion. The company's stock more than tripled from the offering price on opening day, making the three-year-old company worth $4 billion.

The pre-launch name was Procuresoft.Īriba went public in 1999 under Krach's leadership as CEO, and was one of the first business-to-business Internet companies to do an IPO. The name Ariba is a neologism, chosen by a branding company since it was easy to pronounce and spell.

Company beginnings Īriba (now SAP Ariba) was founded in 1996 by Bobby Lent, Boris Putanec, Paul Touw, Rob Desantis, Ed Kinsey, Paul Hegarty, and Keith Krach on the idea of using the Internet to enable companies to facilitate and improve the procurement process, which was paper-based, labor-intensive, and inefficient for large corporations. It was acquired by German software maker SAP SE for $4.3 billion in 2012. SAP Ariba is an American software and information technology services company located in Palo Alto, California.

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