Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Tim Minahan, Network Strategy SVP for Ariba (Part 1)

Tim Minahan is senior vice president of network strategy and global marketing for Ariba, host of the largest business network on the planet. Tim has more than 20 years of experience in enterprise technology research and marketing. In this interview, Tim gives us insights into how Ariba helps businesses of all sizes connect with each other and explains in detail how the Ariba network operates on a global scale.

Sramana Mitra: Tim, let’s start with setting some context. Our audience knows Ariba. We also know that you have been acquired by SAP in the recent years. We covered Ariba in the past in quite a bit of detail. Could you set some context about what you are doing?

Tim Minahan: Absolutely. I head global network strategy here at Ariba. Ariba has one of the world’s largest business networks. In the context of big data, the massive amounts of unstructured data combined with transactional process information present a huge opportunity for businesses of all sizes to make more informed decisions faster than they could ever before.

SM: Talk a little bit about the Ariba business network.

TM: Ariba network is the world’s largest global business network today. It connects over a million businesses that over the last 12 months have transacted more than $450 billion worth of commerce. Quite simply, what Ariba does is eliminate all the hassles that traditionally come along with inter-enterprise collaboration.

Enterprises need to connect with multiple trading partners as they balance a host of different formats and channels when engaging, transacting, and trying to share information with those partners. We eliminate all those hassles – the phone calls, the emails, the faxes, the multiple point-to-point integrations – by providing a single integration point for a buyer, a seller, a bank, or another partner to connect once, to discover and collaborate with what is now one million companies, growing by 1,000 or 1,200 companies per week.

SM: Let’s set some context about what volume and what types of data are getting generated in this network.

TM: First off, if you look at business networks, the first wave is really about connecting companies and creating process efficiencies. But after you reach a certain volume of data in transactions, you can begin to gain new insights from that environment. As I mentioned, the one million connected companies have conducted over $450 billion worth of commerce over the past year.  But they have done this volume for more than 15 years, and we have 15 years of not just transactional data – what transactions occur, which commodities at which price – but relationship data, understanding who is doing business with whom and for how long and how much.

Then there is community-generated data, and this comes in the form of a host of different things. Whether it is community-generated ratings – so buyers are now rating suppliers they did business with in order to help other buyers to make more informed decisions and qualifying a new source, best practices that are being shared – buyers are now sharing commodity approaches and RFP templates through the network. That is the kind of data that is coming to bear.