E-Harmony For Business

IBM and Ariba have signed an agreement designed to help fuel better commerce by matching B2B buyers and sellers of goods and services in the cloud using state-of-the-art collaboration and social networking technologies.

Think E-Harmony for business.

With this deal, Ariba plans to integrate its cloud solution, the Ariba Commerce Cloud, with IBM LotusLive to help buyers and sellers communicate and share information more fluidly and effectively. 

Face-to-face meetings, phone calls, faxes, documents and spreadsheets are being leapfrogged by more advanced, efficient methods of collaboration and communication such as Web conferencing, instant messaging, social networking and file sharing, among other things.

To help companies take advantage of these advances, Ariba’s integration with LotusLive will provide a web-based service that helps buyers and sellers find each other quickly and efficiently for new business opportunities by automatically matching buyers’ business requirements to seller capabilities.

Integrating LotusLive communication and collaboration into the buyer-seller discovery process will provide buyers and sellers the tools to interact, answer questions and exchange accurate information prior to entering the formal RFI/P or contracting phase.  

“Finding the right trading partners is hard. Collaborating with them to do business better is even harder,” said Bhaskar Himatsingka, Chief Technology Officer, Ariba, Inc. “Our integration plans with IBM LotusLive are designed to help make it easier for buyers and sellers to collaborate in new ways by taking advantage of IBM’s powerful set of web-based tools for real-time collaboration within Ariba’s sourcing and sales process solutions.”

“Like people searching for someone special, businesses are looking for a high degree of compatibility with their prospective partners," said Sean Poulley, IBM VP of cloud collaboration.

“The successful combination of LotusLive and the Ariba Commerce Cloud will provide such a matchmaking comfort zone in which networks of partners, suppliers and customers can easily work together across company boundaries to help do their jobs more efficiently and cost-effectively, and perhaps even develop lasting relationships."

Click here to learn more about the IBM LotusLive online collaboration portfolio.