"Ariba (NASDAQ: ARBA) is a software and information technology services company located in Sunnyvale, California.
Ariba was founded in 1996 by Keith Krach on the idea of using the Internet to enable companies to facilitate and improve the procurement process. Procurement had been a paper-based, labor-intensive, and inefficient process for large corporations. According to the company's website, Ariba provides "Spend Management solutions" which help companies "analyze, understand, and manage their corporate spending to achieve cost savings and business process efficiency."
Ariba was one of the first business-to-business Internet companies to go public (in 1999). The company's stock more than tripled from the offering price on opening day,[citation needed] making the three year-old company worth $6 billion. In 2000, the stock value continued to climb, and Ariba's market capitalization was as high as $40 billion. With the bursting of the dot-com bubble, Ariba's stock price fell dramatically to the low double digits in July 2001, where it has lingered since, with a market capitalization of just under $1 billion of July 2009)." (
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