Ariba: Two Decades of Patience Pays Off

I'm coming out of retirement for the announcement that SAP (SAP) is buying Ariba (ARBA). 

Sonofabitch! Ariba is still around! And is a "cloud computing" market player?  What a market-messaging coup.

My first reaction was to email CMO Mike Schmitt at Ariba and congratulate him. 

But I found Mike has moved on.

Sonofabitch! e2Open is still around! e2Open was created in the late 1990s by participants in the electronics and technology supply chains — including Hitachi, IBM, LG Electronics, Lucent Technologies, Nortel Networks, Matsushita Electric (Panasonic), Seagate Technology, Solectron and Toshiba. And now it's a "cloud computing" market player too? 

And e2Open (I may have some of those characters upper case when they should be lower case and vice versa) wants to go public.

Either everything in supply chain management is happening as I predicted, except that I was years ahead of time.  (The link is back to a five-year-old SeekingAlpha post but the research dates back to 1997.) 

Sonofabitch! Maybe I should un-retire.

Or maybe... just maybe... there's another stock bubble in progress.

-- Dennis Byron