Tech Trix Zone

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VisibleGains Launches Postwire At Disrupt, Aims To Be The Flipboard For Client Communication

6:03 PM

Matt is currently working as a writer for TechCrunch. Matt Burns is a family man first and attempts to be a writer second. Born and raised in the heart of the automotive world, only cars eclipse his love of gadgets. He previously wrote for Engadget and EngadgetHD before moving into the party house that is TechCrunch. He learned the retail... ? Learn More

Email is broken. Social networks are not for private file distribution. Collaborative file sharing sites are missing pizzazz and key functions for the enterprise. This is the thought process behind Postwire by VisibleGains.

The company explained to TechCrunch, “We want to do for client communication what Flipboard did for blog reading.” By using a private sharing workspace, Postwire allows for both client collaboration and asset management in a visually smart way. They take shared videos, images and documents, arrange them on a grid layout similar to Pinterest, giving users within the shared group a compelling receptacle for these files. In short Postwire aims to be a landing page for shared files.

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Take internal designers: With Postwire they are able to upload media to a private page shared with just their client. The two can both upload and view media to their personal Postwire account, selectively sharing specific media for quick collaborative sharing. There is even a sidebar that shows usage stats of the media.

The visual interface makes browsing and selecting media a bit more Luddite-friendly than traditional file sharing sites. The dead simple workflow might be Postwire’s most compelling feature.

Postwire is a site for the masses. Files are displayed as media rather than, you know, computer files. Embeddable content like videos and pictures can be viewed directly on the site in a popup. After uploading media, emails can be sent indicating to users that a file was just uploaded intended for collaboration. I was told that an iPhone app is a few months out that will even allow for mobile uploads of pics and videos.

VisableGains launched Postwire’s private beta in April and currently has “several hundred active users.” Prior to launching at Disrupt NYC today, VisableGains has raised $2.5M through two rounds of funding from AVG Ventures including a $1.5M Seed round in September 2010.

q: What’s the price?

a: The price point will be free with a $20 plan over that which gives you 10 pages. There is other a long term plan that includes new designs.

q: This could have been done 10 years ago with HTML. What have you guys seen in the market to suggest now is the time to launch?

a: Especially over the 3-4 years there has been a visual explosion. Pages are becoming able to let users digest pages visual. People expect it. No one like getting an email with a bunch of links. There’s a possibility and an expectation.

q: A big part of your early traction will come from small and medium business – -they are traditionally very hard to target — how are you going to get them on board?

a: We think partnerships one way to start cracking. When you get shared with a Postwire page, you have to sign up for freedom account.

q: What type of files will they be sharing? Why not Pinterest or Dropbox?

a: First, with Pinterest, it’s all photos. Dropbox is al files. Frankly even a Crunchbase page can be put in as a file.

q: How do you protect from new potentially spohiscated sites?

a: By keeping it simple. These people are people who do not want to switch. You’re going to think a lot if you’re going to switch if you’re interacting with your clients with the current system.

Posted in: Client,Communication,Disrupt,Flipboard,Launches,Postwire,VisibleGains

Ron Conway Makes It Clear That SV Angel Is David Lee’s Fund (And It Might Be Raising Another $400M)

1:18 PM

Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in... ? Learn More

Silicon Valley is full of unsung heroes: Mike Krieger, Arash Ferdowsi, interns, the TechCrunch sales team, Heather Harde and the countless engineers that keep the products we love from failing to be the products we love. One of these unsung heroes is SV Angel’s David Lee, who has served as a mentor and sounding board for almost every smart person in the Valley as far as I can tell.

But as of today Lee is a little more “sung”; In a discussion with Michael Arrington on stage at TC Disrupt New York, investor Ron Conway made it even more clear that SV Angel is actually managing partner David Lee’s fund.

The fact that Lee, who used to work at StumbleUpon and Google before co-founding SV Angel, runs the fund is perhaps the Valley’s best-kept not-secret. While Conway actually is listed as investor and not partner on the firm’s Crunchbase profile, it doesn’t stop press and others from constantly writing stuff like, “Ron Conway’s SV Angel fund,” paying scant or no attention to the man actually behind the curtain.

“This is David’s fund,” Conway said to Arrington in response to questioning about financing rumors. “But I have a huge vested interest.” Conway is still the largest investor in SVAngel, which also loops in Arrington himself as a Limited Partner, Kevin Carter, Robert Pollak and Conway’s middle son Topher Conway. “I get to come in and help entrepreneurs, I get to do what I enjoy,” Conway went on.

Interestingly enough, LP Arrington pressed Lee and Conway to comment on the “rumors” that the fund might be raising $400 million, “We are exploring all options …” Lee responded, saying that they are indeed looking for investment but refusing to give more detail.

When asked what startups were particularly interesting to SV Angel, the dynamic duo listed Pinterest (of course), Airbnb, Stripe, Square and Boku. When asked the same question of VC firms, Lee and Conway singled out Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Greylock, Accel and General Catalyst as top choices.

In terms of where he saw the fund’s investment trajectory headed, Lee said that he read somewhere on TechCrunch that the way people are shopping is drastically changing (I’m going to hope he was talking about this post) and that he is most excited about companies like Warby Parker and Pinterest that are transforming the way people consume content, create relationships, and well buy stuff.

“The sharing economy,”"the open graph distributed economy,” and the “P2P sharing” model all got shout out as ecommerce movements that could soon see an influx of (new?) SV Angel cash. SV Angel’s last raise of $20 million happened a year ago last April and, with a rapidly expanding portfolio, it wouldn’t be a surprise if the “rumors” Arrington alluded onstage to are indeed true.

David Lee is the Managing Member at SV Angel, where Ron Conway is a Special Partner. SV Angel focuses its investments on early-stage consumer media companies. He focuses on investments within the consumer Internet, mobile, video and other IT industries. Prior to SV Angel, he was at Google, where he led new business development efforts in video, media and content/data partnerships. After Google, he led all business development-related efforts for StumbleUpon. Recently he was a partner at Baseline Ventures...

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Posted in: Angel,Another,Clear,Conway,David,Makes,Might,Raising

Ron Conway Will “Never” Run For Mayor Of San Francisco

8:22 AM

In case you were wondering: Ron Conway says he will not be running for mayor of San Francisco.

Apparently that was on Mike Arrington’s mind when he interviewed Conway and SV Angel partner David Lee on-stage at Disrupt today. He said he heard from more than one source that Conway is considering a run “somewhere down the line,” and asked flat-out if that’s true.

“That’s a rumor I can assure you is false,” Conway replied. “There’s an old saying: ‘Never say never.’ I actually believe in that saying, but I will never run for mayor of San Francisco.” Had he explored it at all? “Not for a nanosecond.”

The idea isn’t quite as out-of-left-field as it sounds. Conway has been visibly involved in civic issues recently — apparently he met with Senator Chuck Schumer recently to discuss SOPA/PIPA and immigration issues, and along with current Mayor Ed Lee and former TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde, he recently helped launch a program called sfCITI aimed at helping the tech industry and the city work together. (In fact, Conway’s relationship with Mayor Lee seemed close enough to prompt a largely critical Bay Citizen article printed in The New York Times.) When grilled about how much of his time he’s “throwing away on government work” (Arrington’s words), Conway estimated that it was 20 percent.

On the mayoral question, Conway’s response might seem pretty definitive, but Arrington wasn’t satisfied. He asked if Conway might be lying. (Conway: “I would never lie to you about this.”) Later, he asked again Conway was running.

“Last time I checked 10 minutes ago, I was not running for mayor,” Conway said.

Companies: Haute Secure, Topsy, SV Angel, 140 Proof, Start Fund, Jaxtr, Asana, Associated Content, MarketShare Partners, DonorsChoose.org, Angel Investors LP

Ronald Conway has been an active angel investor for over 15 years. He was the Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors LP funds (1998-2005) whose investments included: Google, Ask Jeeves, Paypal, Good Technology, Opsware, and Brightmail. Ron was previously with National Semiconductor Corporation in marketing positions from 1973-1979, and Altos Computer Systems as a co-founder, President and CEO from 1979-1990. He eventually took Altos public in 1982 and served as CEO of Personal Training Systems (PTS)...

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Posted in: Conway,Francisco,Mayor,Never

Apptegic Uses Big Data Analysis To Help Companies Retain And Upsell Their Customers

4:37 AM

Ryan has spent more than five years covering business, technology, and telecom-related subjects for a variety of publications based in New York and San Francisco. Ryan currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. ? Learn More

For SaaS companies, whose customers are usually signed up on recurring monthly billing cycles, the art of retaining customers is just as important as winning them over in the first place. In fact, it’s probably more important, since customers aren’t tied in to long-term deals. It’s also a lot cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire a new one. So they need to better understand them and work harder to keep them coming back, which is where Apptegic comes in.

The startup, which is being launched as part of TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield, uses big data to provide detailed analytics that companies can use to better engage with their customers. To do so, Apptegic is introducing what it calls a “customer guidance system” (CGS) to identify trends among customer usage and to give them tools to message users in real time and suggest new features that they can use.

Founders Karl Wirth and Greg Hinkle worked together at Red Hat, where they built operations management tools for SaaS companies. What they found was that there weren’t a lot of tools out there to help those businesses understand their customers and retain them. So they set out to build those tools.

Apptegic provides a cloud-based platform that essentially uses big data to analyze behavioral click-through data from customer interactions, then scores the engagement so that businesses can know which features customers find important, and which aren’t. What’s sticky, and what keeps customers coming back. Once a business recognizes that, it can build tools to improve the way that it interacts with those customers.

They can customize those reports based on the data that they find important. Apptegic customers can also use the platform to set rules around certain types of customer usage and message their users in real time. That can help guide them to features that they might not be aware of, or to help upsell them on features they haven’t yet bought.

Currently Apptegic is focused on web applications, but Wirth told me that it’s looking to extend onto other platforms, and could optimize for mobile applications. It’s currently working with 30 beta customers, but will be launching the cloud-based service this week to add more trial users.

Apptegic has five employees now, and has raised $2 million from Point Judith Capital, Advanced Technology Ventures, Jit Saxena, and other angel investors.

Q: What do you include that current systems don’t?

A: We combine real-time click-stream data and real-time messaging.

Q: What was the Ah-ha moment that told you the world needs this?

A: We were working with a lot of customers and realized that there were a lot of people building this themselves.

Q: How is this more than Google Analytics?

A: This gives you information down to the user and offer the opportunity to reach them in real-time.

Q: Where are you in terms of launching, and what’s the revenue model?

A: We’re launching today and starting to charge today. We charged based on the number of end users that our customers reach.

Posted in: Analysis,Apptegic,Companies,Customers,Retain,Their,Upsell

Startup Alley Day 2 — It’s A Jungle Out There, But The Startups Keep Coming

12:02 AM

Mike Butcher is the European Editor for TechCrunch. A former grunge rock drummer, he became a long time journalist, and has since written for UK national newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman. Mike is also a co-founder and shareholder of TechHub, a co-working space/service/community with several locations... ? Learn More

Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt makes for a pretty grueling experience when so many companies are pitching every passer-by. But Jordan Crook and I went in feet first to check out some of the startups there.

In scenes more reminiscent of tag-team pro-wrestling, or perhaps a sort of Startup relay race, we tag-teamed around and interviewed a bunch of them including Jaxx, Screach, Fanitics, Edaman, SnapCrowd, ColourDNA, Atticous and BuzzCard. Check all of Tuesday’s startups out here.

We also took a trip over to the Israeli Pavilion to check out the likes of Drippler and Vodio among others. Enjoy!

Posted in: Alley,Coming,Jungle,Startup,StartUps,There

Thursday, May 24, 2012

CAD Users Rejoice: Sunglass Brings Slick 3D Modeling To The Browser

7:18 PM

Kim-Mai Cutler is a technology journalist who has worked for Bloomberg, VentureBeat and The Wall Street Journal. Before she joined TechCrunch, she led mobile coverage at Inside Network, a six-person media startup that was acquired by WebMediaBrands in 2011 for $14 million in cash and stock. She specializes in covering gaming, distribution and monetization of mobile applications and venture... ? Learn More

Software is eating another part of the world. (Or at least the next generation of software is eating the older 1970s-era kind.)

Sunglass, which is coming out of beta today at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, should bring a bit of joy to longtime CAD users and professional architects and designers. The company is launching very social, browser-based software for 3D modeling.

“This is like Google Docs for 3D objects,” said CEO and co-founder Kaustuv DeBiswas. “We’re taking traditional desktop software from the architecture world and putting it in the cloud.” Sunglass is undercutting existing computer-aided design software dramatically. Normally, this older software can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000, he adds. In contrast, the most basic version of Sunglass is free and then designers can pay for extra apps or add ons.

This is not a total replacement, however. It’s meant to be a collaboration tool for teams of designers or individual hobbyists. “Software modeling has seen 30 to 40 years of development. We don’t want to compete on a feature-by-feature basis,” he said.

Inside Sunglass, designers can take a 3D model and rotate, flip or scale it without Adobe Flash. It’s built with HTML5 and WebGL. The team behind Sunglass comes from MIT. DeBiswas earned his Ph.D in design computation and was a TED fellow last year while his co-founder Nitin Rao is an MBA from Sloan that started his career out in social enterprise and microfinance.

DeBiswas has spent years thinking about the future of design technology. ”Sunglass is a product that’s fluid enough that everyone from a kid doing a Maker Bot to a professional firm can use it,” he said.

Sunglass works with more than different 40 different file formats, removing a hurdle that has long made it frustrating for designers to critique and give feedback on each other’s work. There’s also a Dropbox integration for storing and accessing 3-D files.

It’s also a bit social. Sunglass users can simultaneously access a single 3D model and suggest tweaks through chat or voice chat. There’s also a sketch tool for marking suggestions. It’s easier to share 3D models with embeds like this one on DeBiswas’ Tumblr. He says that helps with virally attracting new customers. There is also an API that lets designers build tools for others. Because Sunglass is a platform play, the company is hoping that developers will eventually build specific tools that others will want on an as-needed basis.

They’re not pursuing a classic monthly subscription model with one standard set of paid premium features. Instead, customers can pay for apps at a rate of about $25 a month.

“Our vision for software in the future is that it will be a collection selected parts,” Rao said. “It won’t be a big company giving you a one-size-fits-all set of toolbars.” He gave an example app that does very fast cloud-based rendering. It takes about 45 seconds per object.

Taking a page from Sequoia-backed Unity Technologies’ business model, there’s also a store where designers can buy one-off 3D models from others. Unity, which has a 3D gaming engine that powers titles like Shadowgun, has a store where game developers can buy 3D effects and models from other developers.

“After cutting costs and fixing interoperability, the third thing we want to go after is building a community with this store. We have a lot to learn from the gaming industry and we think the comparable opportunity in the product design and architecture market is really massive.”

Sunglass has raised $1.8 million in seed funding from General Catalyst, Sherpalo Ventures, Lerer Ventures and Maynard Webb.

Q: What are the biggest technical difficulties in bringing this to the browser? And what are the benefits versus doing this on the browser?

A: Most of the computation doing computation are doing it back stage. We have super computers. If you think about it one of our clients, their reactions were my client gives me large BIM files which I have no use for except that we have to go ahead and re-model. We support 45 file formats and you can drag at 3D file. We are working on technologies which will give you data on demand. We’ve taken this constraint as an opportunity.

Q: Is this for professional users? Or for regular people? The presentation implies that you’ll have users who are not fluent with CAD.

A: This spans from kids playing with the motorcycles above to professionals who are modeling fluid dynamics. Starting off, it’s aimed at professional designers, but it’s easy enough that you don’t need complex training.

Q: Can you talk about price points?

A: Bite-sized modules and apps for anywhere from $25 to 100 per month.

Q: You guys are latching on to a huge trend in terms of designs. How do you help synchronous collaboration? Many of these designers don’t see themselves as early adopters. They may not feel comfortable with this or with their work in the cloud. How do you deal with this?

A: Asynchronous collaboration is important. We’re working with a version where you can store a version. We have a version on Tumblr. Other people could view it on Tumblr. We have all the persistence of data on the back-end. It’s not transient. It’s not just real-time collaboration. The second thing is about behavior. Two things. We think the product has enough virality in it. I would send you a link. You don’t need a plug-in. It’s just HTML5, WebGL. We’ve made the interface light. We believe that tomorrow that software will be a collection of small pieces. We’ve intentionally kept it very simple. This has happened to every other industry. We believe it will also happen in design.

Posted in: Brings,Browser,Modeling,Rejoice,Slick,Sunglass,Users

The 15 Startups That Launched At Disrupt NYC Day 2. Who’s Your Favorite?

3:28 PM

Elin is the Community Manager for TechCrunch. Previously, she was one of the first Community Managers at Slide and was in charge of one of their most successful products, SuperPoke! Pets. Slide went on to be acquired by Google for $182 million. Originally from Huntington Beach, Elin attended California State University, Chico, where she studied Organizational Communications and Art... ? Learn More

145090591AP001_TechCrunch_D | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Disrupt NYC day two has just wrapped up. During the conference today, Michael Arrington demanded to know from Ron Conway when he was going to run for Mayor of San Francisco (he kept saying he would “never”), our very own Josh Constine grilled Tim Armstrong with questions about AOL, layoffs, which publication he likes more: Huffington Post or TechCrunch (he said “both”), and we watched 15 more amazing startups battle it out for the ultimate Disrupt prize — the Disrupt Cup and $50,000.

Starting tomorrow at 3:30pm ET we will have our Startup Battlefield Disrupt finals. Yesterday, we wrote detailed articles with pictures and pitches from all of the startups who presented. Below are the ones who were featured today. Out of these 30 companies, both from yesterday and today, five will be chosen to fight it out for the ultimate prize. We will have an all-star panel of judges tomorrow for the finals and things will probably get intense; people always get a little crazy at the finals, but as you can imagine, it’s a blast to watch. So, take your time in reviewing all of the stellar startups below. Compared to the brilliant ones yesterday, which startup do you think will make it to the finals? Going further, any guesses on who you think will win it all?

Tune in tomorrow for the results!

Session 4: Disrupting Local

SpotlessCity
SpotlessCity helps local dry cleaners connect with customers in a brand new way and lets people finally get their clothes cleaned in the same convenient way they already handle all of their other chores – online.

Mirth
Mirth is a principled objection to the frenzy of details. It’s a card-linked loyalty experience for the regulars of business with character.

SnipSnap
SnipSnap is the first mobile application to let you scan, save, and redeem printed coupons on your smartphone. It was featured by Apple on the App Store front page and rose to a top-50 ranking after going live.

Centzy
Compare services in your area by price, rating, hours, and more. We use paid crowdsourcing to gather comprehensive data from every local business, including the 75% of them that don’t post their information anywhere else online.

Cardify
Unlock VIP rewards and perks at your favorite places when you pay with a credit card that’s connected to Cardify…. throw away your punch cards and keep that phone in your pocket.

Session 5: Disrupting Collaboration

Vinlymint
Vinlymint is a real-time creation web application that easily fits into your existing production methods, allows you to store and manage projects from a single place and collaborate with anyone, anytime and anywhere.

Postwire
Postwire enables you to make a private webpage for each client. You can collect videos, photos, web links, and documents and share them on each client’s private page.

Sunglass
Sunglass is a cloud-based platform that enables designers to collaboratively build tomorrow’s products, buildings and cities, democratizing access to 3D content across formats.

Talkdesk
Talkdesk allows any company to create a call center in 5 minutes – all in the browser.

Apptegic
Apptegic helps online businesses keep and up-sell their existing customers. Use Apptegic’s online service to understand each of your customer’s visit patterns, actions, and business metrics and to respond appropriately in real-time.

Session 6: Disrupting Identity Networks

Hmmm
Hmmm empowers you to express and share your life without inhibitions. You can tailor your online-identity like you do in the real-world, as you interact and selectively share with people from every walk of life.

Social Stock
Social Stock is a stock market of places and people, where every place and person has a stock price based on their social interactions and enables trading social shares in places and people.

About Last Night
About Last Night is your social network for nightlife. It’s about the party last night, the concert last night, or the date last night. Do you want to know where the hot party is happening, where your friends are, or what is happening at your favorite hangout? Do you want to know who is performing at your favorite club, or learn about special deals and offers? Are you visiting from out-of-town and want to know where to go? About Last Night is for you.

Hownow
Hownow is a mobile app that allows users to post geo-fenced messages in order to have semi-anonymous, locally relevant conversations.

Buyou (Startup Alley Audience Choice Winner)
Buyou is a free online mall that aggregates various brands into one beautiful, easy to use interface. And while it’s great that the app begins learning your taste through your likes and dislikes, it’s even better that it relays that information back to its brand partners. This means that a retailer like Express will begin to learn the clothes you like and more asily target clothing you may enjoy to you.

All in all, it was a very fun day. And will be even more fun tomorrow. See you then.

Posted in: Disrupt,Favorite,Launched,StartUps

From SF Disrupt To 500 Startups, CardFlick’s Next Trick Is Managing Your Personal Connections

12:23 PM

The winner of the Audience Choice Award during TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, CardFlick launched with an application for building digital business cards on your mobile device and sharing them with new contacts. Rather than bumping to share those cards, users “flick” them to other users who have downloaded the app.

After that, the next step was refining things. To do that, CardFlick has joined the most recent 500 Startups Accelerator class and is working on the next big transition in its evolution. To start, it’s adding more features and functionality around its core card product.

While CardFlick initially launched with a limited number of themes, it has been working on providing more customization for its users. The startup is currently doing that through its Instacards site. The next version of the CardFlick app — which will be released over the next few weeks — will bring similar customization features available to the app itself.

But CardFlick founder Ketan Anjaria sees an even bigger opportunity ahead. The team brought on Jared Kopf, cofounder and CEO of deals company HomeRun (acquired by Rearden Commerce last September), as an adviser. And as part of its 500 Startups experience, it’s begun working on expanding beyond just business cards and the way people present themselves to others. It’s all part of a pivot toward the introduction of a new product that will be introduced at 500 Startups Accelerator demo days on July 17-18 in Mountain View and July 23 in New York City.

CardFlick helps you create and share online business cards using your iPhone in one flick. 1 Click login with services like Facebook and then your card is prefilled with your contact using one of our beautiful themes Share your card with multiple people at a time just by flicking your phone or even email. New themes can be purchased in app. Customers are anyone who has a business to promote and wants to network without the hassle.

Learn more

Posted in: CardFlicks,Connections,Disrupt,Managing,Personal,StartUps,Trick

SAP To Acquire Ariba For $4.3 Billion

7:58 AM

Sarah currently works as a writer for TechCrunch, after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to becoming a professional blogger, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software. ? Learn More

Business software giant SAP announced today that it will acquire Ariba’s cloud -based business commerce network for approximately $4.3 billion. SAP’s subsidiary, SAP America, Inc., is offering $45 per share for the platform, and plans to close the deal during the third quarter, pending Ariba shareholder approval of the sale. Ariba had 100.2 million shares on the market, as of March 31st, according to an AP report citing FactSet data.

The Ariba board of directors has already unanimously approved the transaction. The per share purchase price represents a 20% premium over the May 21 closing price and a 19% premium over the one month volume weighted average price per share, says SAP.

The deal will be funded from SAP’s free cash and a €2.4 billion term loan facility and is expected to be accretive to SAP’s non-IFRS earnings per share in 2013. SAP says the acquisition will combine Ariba’s successful buyer-seller collaboration network with SAP’s own customer base and solutions in order to create new models for business-to-business collaboration in the cloud.

Sunnyvale-based Ariba has approximately 2,600 employees, $444 million in total revenue, and experienced 38.5 percent annual growth in 2011. Its business network recorded 62 percent organic growth in the same period. With the addition of Ariba, SAP will acquire the leader in cloud-based collaborative business commerce.

The focus of Ariba’s business is in procurement, spend management, and supplier discovery, and is partnered with major ERP suppliers, including SAP, as well as Salesforce, IBM and Oracle.

“The cloud has profoundly changed the way people interact. The impact will be even greater as enterprises connect and collaborate in new ways with their global networks of customers and partners,” SAP Co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe said in a statement. “Cloud-based collaboration is redefining business network innovation, and we are catching this wave in the early stage of its evolution. The addition of Ariba will create the business network of the future, deliver immediate value to our customers and provide another solid engine for driving SAP’s growth in the cloud.”