SAP Looks to Unify Spend Management

SAP is looking to launch a channel initiative around spend management software and services that would encompass its SAP Ariba, SAP Concur and SAP Fieldglass offerings.

All three of these offerings are designed to enable organizations to exercise more spending control over the goods and services they consume. SAP Ariba is a business-to-business e-commerce network. SAP Concur and SAP Fieldglass are software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that enable organizations to better control how much they spend on travel and general services, respectively.

SAP sees an opportunity for its partners to specialize in helping organizations apply more discipline to their spend management processes, says Sean Thompson, senior vice president for business networks and ecosystems for SAP Ariba.

As part of that effort, SAP plans to also open its application programming interfaces (APIs) to partners that choose to participate in this ecosystem, says Thompson. SAP longer term is also working toward creating a common data object model under all three application services in addition to moving to one day providing a common user interface, adds Thompson.

SAP already has both traditional and non-traditional partners adding services on top of SAP spend management offerings. One of its less traditional partners is Barclaycard, an arm of the British bank that provides payment services that tap into everything from the SAP Ariba network to airline transaction systems such as SABRE. Barclaycard then makes available analytics tools ion top of a data lake to analyze spending trends on behalf of corporate clients.

It’s too early to say to what degree a spend management specialization might gain traction in the channel. SAP expects that all three applications would be offered via a consumption-based pricing model that partners would align their services around, says Thompson. Collectively, all three applications already manage trillions of dollars in corporate spending, notes Thompson.

“Ariba today is managing $3 trillion in transactions,” says Thompson.

Corporate spend management solutions may not have broad appeal across the channel, but in terms of being an issue that appeals to senior business executives it may turn out that spend management is one of those bottom line priorities that are too big for channel partners to ignore.