SHORT VERSION FOR BUSY EXECUTIVES
SAP acquired Ariba for $4.3 billion in 2012. We’ve now completed the first independent assessment of whether that acquisition improved or degraded implementation outcomes for practitioners — scored across three corporate phases using the Hansen Fit Score™.
The results: Ariba scored 5.1 (Conditional Proceed). SAP scored 4.1 (High Risk). SAP Ariba — the combined entity that was supposed to be greater than the sum of its parts — scored 4.3. Still High Risk.
Technology Capability climbed to 7.5 out of 10. Outcome Measurement fell to 2.8. The gap between what the platform can do and what organizations actually achieve widened to 4.7 points — a structural business model misalignment that no amount of BTP replatforming will fix by itself.
The full 14-page assessment with five executive graphics, dimension-level scoring, and the 18-year evidence chain is available on Payhip. What follows here is the story behind the numbers.
THE LONG VERSION
In August 2007, during interviews with Ariba leadership for what became this blog’s first coverage of the platform, something didn’t add up. The technology was real. The network effects were real. But the gap between what Ariba could demonstrate and what organizations were actually achieving in deployment told a different story. I documented what I called “architectural debt” — not in the code, but in the implementation methodology. The assumption that a good platform would produce good outcomes without a structured behavioral readiness framework.
Five months later, in January 2008, I published what is likely the industry’s first independent white paper on SAP’s procurement capabilities. That paper documented something specific: SAP’s manufacturing DNA — the ERP-first worldview that treats procurement as a module rather than a discipline — was producing catastrophic implementation failures. Hershey. FoxMeyer. HP. Cadbury. Not anecdotes borrowed from someone else’s research. Cases documented contemporaneously, as they were happening.
In September 2010, the Ontario Education Collaborative Marketplace (OECM) lost $20 million on an Ariba deployment. Same platform that Virginia’s eVA program was using successfully. Same technology. Opposite outcomes. The variable wasn’t the software. It was the methodology — or more precisely, its absence.
Then came October 2012. SAP acquired Ariba for $4.3 billion. The analysts celebrated. The market approved. The narrative was clean and compelling: SAP’s enterprise scale plus Ariba’s cloud procurement network equals an unassailable market leader.
But nobody asked the practitioner question: does combining two organizational DNA profiles — one rooted in manufacturing ERP, the other in cloud procurement networking — actually improve the thing that matters? Does it make implementations succeed?
Eighteen years of evidence says no.
WHAT THE GRAPH TELLS YOU
The gold line is Technology Capability. It went up after the acquisition — from 7.2 (Ariba) to 7.5 (SAP Ariba). The burgundy line is Outcome Measurement. It went down — from 3.8 to 2.8. The red zone between them is the Capability-to-Outcome Gap. It widened from 3.4 points to 4.7 points.
This is the Acquisition Paradox: the $4.3 billion transaction made the technology better and the outcomes worse. That inverse correlation isn’t an anomaly. It’s the signature of a structural business model misalignment — when a vendor optimizes for platform capability and market position while the behavioral and methodological infrastructure required to convert capability into results erodes.
A gap exceeding 4.0 points in the Hansen Fit Score framework indicates structural misalignment. SAP Ariba sits at 4.7. The largest Capability-to-Outcome divergence in the vendor assessment series to date.
THE REPLATFORMING QUESTION
In October 2025, SAP Ariba announced it would replatform onto SAP Business Technology Platform, abandoning its 25-year-old codebase. This is significant for two reasons.
First, it validates the architectural debt thesis documented in this blog since 2007. The vendor itself has now confirmed that the platform’s technical foundation — the same foundation the market was told represented the future of procurement — was unsustainable.
Second, it raises an urgent question for every organization currently running on SAP Ariba: you are deploying on a platform the vendor has declared obsolete. And if the Capability-to-Outcome Gap was 4.7 points on the platform they spent 25 years building, what will it be during the transition to one they haven’t?
WHAT THE ANALYSTS WON’T TELL YOU
Here is a question worth sitting with: when was the last time a major analyst firm published independently verified implementation success rates for any procurement technology vendor?
Not vendor-supplied customer satisfaction surveys. Not curated reference calls. Not “our clients tell us” anecdotes dressed up as data. Independently verified success rates measured against the stated objectives of the implementation, tracked over time, using a consistent methodology across vendors.
The Hansen Fit Score vendor assessment series exists because that question has no answer. The analyst model — built on vendor access, vendor briefings, and vendor revenue — is structurally unable to produce the one metric practitioners actually need: the probability that this technology will deliver what the vendor says it will deliver, in your organization, given your readiness level.
This assessment uses 233 articles published in the Procurement Insights archive between 2007 and 2025, the 2008 SAP white paper, publicly available case studies, and vendor announcements. No vendor interviews. No demos. No sponsorship. No briefing fees. The methodology is RAM 2025™ multimodel validation — five independent AI models analyzing the same evidence base and confirming methodology, evidence chain, scoring, fairness, and defensibility through Level 3 of 5.
We measure what the analysts won’t measure because their business model prevents them from measuring it. That’s not a criticism. It’s a structural observation. And it’s why this work exists.
THE VIRGINIA-OECM PROOF
If you take only one thing from this assessment, take this: Virginia’s eVA program and Ontario’s OECM deployed the same Ariba platform in roughly the same era. Virginia succeeded. OECM lost $20 million. The technology was identical. The outcomes were opposite.
That’s the entire argument in two data points. Outcomes are methodology-dependent, not platform-driven. And until the industry builds assessment frameworks that measure organizational readiness as rigorously as they measure technology capability, the documented 80% implementation failure rate isn’t going to move.
WHAT’S IN THE FULL REPORT
The complete Ariba | SAP | SAP Ariba Consolidated Assessment is a 14-page independent analysis available for $1,750. It includes Hansen Fit Score dimension-level scoring across all three phases, five executive graphics, the cross-series risk comparison against Zycus and Coupa, the complete 18-year evidence timeline, five critical questions no analyst firm has asked, and the multi-model validation summary.
If a failed implementation costs $3 million and the failure rate is 65%, your risk exposure is $1.95 million. This report costs 0.09% of that risk.
The full report is available here: Ariba | SAP | SAP Ariba Consolidated Assessment Report
You can also learn about our Annual Subscription Service, which gives you access to the entire library of vendor assessment reports
Hansen Models™ — Practitioner Performance Analysis & Vendor Reconciliation Exposed. Explainable. Repeatable.
Jon Hansen has covered the procurement technology market independently since 2007 through Procurement Insights, with an archive of over 3,500 posts. The Hansen Fit Score™ Vendor Assessment Series and RAM 2025™ multimodel validation methodology are products of Hansen Models (1001279896 Ontario Inc.).
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Procurement Insights
The $4.3 Billion Question Nobody Asked: Three Phases, One Acquisition, 18 Years of Evidence
Posted on February 7, 2026
0
SHORT VERSION FOR BUSY EXECUTIVES
SAP acquired Ariba for $4.3 billion in 2012. We’ve now completed the first independent assessment of whether that acquisition improved or degraded implementation outcomes for practitioners — scored across three corporate phases using the Hansen Fit Score™.
The results: Ariba scored 5.1 (Conditional Proceed). SAP scored 4.1 (High Risk). SAP Ariba — the combined entity that was supposed to be greater than the sum of its parts — scored 4.3. Still High Risk.
Technology Capability climbed to 7.5 out of 10. Outcome Measurement fell to 2.8. The gap between what the platform can do and what organizations actually achieve widened to 4.7 points — a structural business model misalignment that no amount of BTP replatforming will fix by itself.
The full 14-page assessment with five executive graphics, dimension-level scoring, and the 18-year evidence chain is available on Payhip. What follows here is the story behind the numbers.
THE LONG VERSION
In August 2007, during interviews with Ariba leadership for what became this blog’s first coverage of the platform, something didn’t add up. The technology was real. The network effects were real. But the gap between what Ariba could demonstrate and what organizations were actually achieving in deployment told a different story. I documented what I called “architectural debt” — not in the code, but in the implementation methodology. The assumption that a good platform would produce good outcomes without a structured behavioral readiness framework.
Five months later, in January 2008, I published what is likely the industry’s first independent white paper on SAP’s procurement capabilities. That paper documented something specific: SAP’s manufacturing DNA — the ERP-first worldview that treats procurement as a module rather than a discipline — was producing catastrophic implementation failures. Hershey. FoxMeyer. HP. Cadbury. Not anecdotes borrowed from someone else’s research. Cases documented contemporaneously, as they were happening.
In September 2010, the Ontario Education Collaborative Marketplace (OECM) lost $20 million on an Ariba deployment. Same platform that Virginia’s eVA program was using successfully. Same technology. Opposite outcomes. The variable wasn’t the software. It was the methodology — or more precisely, its absence.
Then came October 2012. SAP acquired Ariba for $4.3 billion. The analysts celebrated. The market approved. The narrative was clean and compelling: SAP’s enterprise scale plus Ariba’s cloud procurement network equals an unassailable market leader.
But nobody asked the practitioner question: does combining two organizational DNA profiles — one rooted in manufacturing ERP, the other in cloud procurement networking — actually improve the thing that matters? Does it make implementations succeed?
Eighteen years of evidence says no.
WHAT THE GRAPH TELLS YOU
The gold line is Technology Capability. It went up after the acquisition — from 7.2 (Ariba) to 7.5 (SAP Ariba). The burgundy line is Outcome Measurement. It went down — from 3.8 to 2.8. The red zone between them is the Capability-to-Outcome Gap. It widened from 3.4 points to 4.7 points.
This is the Acquisition Paradox: the $4.3 billion transaction made the technology better and the outcomes worse. That inverse correlation isn’t an anomaly. It’s the signature of a structural business model misalignment — when a vendor optimizes for platform capability and market position while the behavioral and methodological infrastructure required to convert capability into results erodes.
A gap exceeding 4.0 points in the Hansen Fit Score framework indicates structural misalignment. SAP Ariba sits at 4.7. The largest Capability-to-Outcome divergence in the vendor assessment series to date.
THE REPLATFORMING QUESTION
In October 2025, SAP Ariba announced it would replatform onto SAP Business Technology Platform, abandoning its 25-year-old codebase. This is significant for two reasons.
First, it validates the architectural debt thesis documented in this blog since 2007. The vendor itself has now confirmed that the platform’s technical foundation — the same foundation the market was told represented the future of procurement — was unsustainable.
Second, it raises an urgent question for every organization currently running on SAP Ariba: you are deploying on a platform the vendor has declared obsolete. And if the Capability-to-Outcome Gap was 4.7 points on the platform they spent 25 years building, what will it be during the transition to one they haven’t?
WHAT THE ANALYSTS WON’T TELL YOU
Here is a question worth sitting with: when was the last time a major analyst firm published independently verified implementation success rates for any procurement technology vendor?
Not vendor-supplied customer satisfaction surveys. Not curated reference calls. Not “our clients tell us” anecdotes dressed up as data. Independently verified success rates measured against the stated objectives of the implementation, tracked over time, using a consistent methodology across vendors.
The Hansen Fit Score vendor assessment series exists because that question has no answer. The analyst model — built on vendor access, vendor briefings, and vendor revenue — is structurally unable to produce the one metric practitioners actually need: the probability that this technology will deliver what the vendor says it will deliver, in your organization, given your readiness level.
This assessment uses 233 articles published in the Procurement Insights archive between 2007 and 2025, the 2008 SAP white paper, publicly available case studies, and vendor announcements. No vendor interviews. No demos. No sponsorship. No briefing fees. The methodology is RAM 2025™ multimodel validation — five independent AI models analyzing the same evidence base and confirming methodology, evidence chain, scoring, fairness, and defensibility through Level 3 of 5.
We measure what the analysts won’t measure because their business model prevents them from measuring it. That’s not a criticism. It’s a structural observation. And it’s why this work exists.
THE VIRGINIA-OECM PROOF
If you take only one thing from this assessment, take this: Virginia’s eVA program and Ontario’s OECM deployed the same Ariba platform in roughly the same era. Virginia succeeded. OECM lost $20 million. The technology was identical. The outcomes were opposite.
That’s the entire argument in two data points. Outcomes are methodology-dependent, not platform-driven. And until the industry builds assessment frameworks that measure organizational readiness as rigorously as they measure technology capability, the documented 80% implementation failure rate isn’t going to move.
WHAT’S IN THE FULL REPORT
The complete Ariba | SAP | SAP Ariba Consolidated Assessment is a 14-page independent analysis available for $1,750. It includes Hansen Fit Score dimension-level scoring across all three phases, five executive graphics, the cross-series risk comparison against Zycus and Coupa, the complete 18-year evidence timeline, five critical questions no analyst firm has asked, and the multi-model validation summary.
If a failed implementation costs $3 million and the failure rate is 65%, your risk exposure is $1.95 million. This report costs 0.09% of that risk.
The full report is available here: Ariba | SAP | SAP Ariba Consolidated Assessment Report
You can also learn about our Annual Subscription Service, which gives you access to the entire library of vendor assessment reports
Hansen Models™ — Practitioner Performance Analysis & Vendor Reconciliation Exposed. Explainable. Repeatable.
Jon Hansen has covered the procurement technology market independently since 2007 through Procurement Insights, with an archive of over 3,500 posts. The Hansen Fit Score™ Vendor Assessment Series and RAM 2025™ multimodel validation methodology are products of Hansen Models (1001279896 Ontario Inc.).
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