Ariba Inc., a vendor of software for procurement and supplier relationship management, has made its Ariba StartSourcing application available for free. The product was designed to help small and medium-sized companies locate trading partners and negotiate for goods and services. Features of the tool include creation and management of requests for proposals; auctions, competitive bidding and timing; communications and messaging; sourcing reporting; global and multilingual capabilities, and Web-based buyer and supplier training and online tutorials. Users can also access Ariba Discovery, a business-matching service through which buyers can identify and qualify trading partners from a global community of more than 700,000 selling organizations, and sellers can access new business opportunities. Ariba delivers its technology in a cloud-based environment.
