SAP Ariba Just Killed the Legacy Source-to-Pay Suite

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Hi {{FIRST_NAME|readers}},

While everyone's been obsessing over AI features (me included 😅), the biggest ProcureTech story in 25 years happened quietly on October 8^th, 2025:

SAP Ariba, the 800-pound gorilla of procurement technology, announced their legacy platform can't be fixed.

They're starting over, rewriting their solution on a new technology platform…

They didn’t say it in so many words but that’s why I’m here… To help you read between the lines… 😉

If you've been working on a procurement technology roadmap, this changes everything, even if Ariba isn’t in your orbit!

In this week's newsletter, I break down what happened, why it matters to the market, and what comes next.

Onwards!

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👀 In Case You Missed It…
My Best Linkedin post this week:

Here's what you can do to get ahead with AI Agents in procurement if you can't secure budget for a best-of-breed, fit-for-purpose tool.

They finally admitted it.

After years of frustrated procurement pro whispers in the deep, dark corners of conference halls, SAP Ariba pulled the trigger everyone had lost hope on…

They're rebuilding the product from scratch.

Last October at SAP Connect, Ariba confirmed what the market already knew: their legacy platform is done. "Next-gen SAP Ariba," they called it: built on their Business Technology Platform (BTP - Released in 2021), completely redesigned UX, embedded analytics, built from the ground up around AI, the whole nine yards.

Translation? It’s over for the “old” suite.

And if the market leader with the deepest pockets and biggest install base is tapping out on their legacy code base, the Source-to-Pay suite as we knew it is officially dead.

In September 2024, I wondered aloud whether the Source-to-Pay Suite was dying…

Then, back in January, I made my case for the challenge ahead (Is SAP Ariba still “King of the Hill”?). Procurement satisfaction surveys have been screaming the same message for years. The S2P suite model has failed to meet procurement’s needs. Full stop.

The proof? Other than the surveys, you need look no further than the explosion of ProcureTech startups in the past five years. That doesn't happen in a satisfied market.

When your customers are desperately bolting on third-party solutions to make your "comprehensive, end-to-end suite" actually work, there’s still a problem to be solved...

When Gartner analysts stop recommending "best-of-suite" and start pushing "composable architecture," that says a lot...

Consider the ages of the leading S2P Suites:

These aren't just old… They're ancient by tech standards. And it shows.

The bigger your customer base, the more resource drain from legacy issues and feature requests. The more technical debt you accumulate. The slower you move. It's the innovator's dilemma playing out in real-time.

While the legacy players were busy maintaining big codebases on legacy architectures, new entrants were busy redefining the “end-to-end procurement solution”, applying the lessons learned from previous generations of tech:

Companies like Pivot*, Focal Point*, Vertice*, BeNeering, ConvergentIS, ORO Labs, Zip, Tropic, and Omnea have all being implementing the above from from day one.

*Pure Procurement Newsletter partners

Loosely speaking, these all got folded into an “Intake & Orchestration” category (rightly or not).

The old players noticed. Hard not to when your sales pipeline starts looking anemic.

Watch what happened:

Every single leading legacy S2P vendor either built or partnered for the exact capabilities these startups were pushing.

Survival mode activated.

These moves don't happen because everything's going great. They happen when sales teams are losing deals to upstarts with a fraction of your R&D budget.

GEP actually got ahead of this… They re-platformed and released GEP Quantum back in October 2023. Props to them for reading the room early.

But Ariba? Ariba is the room.

When you're the undisputed market share leader in the category and you announce you're essentially starting over, you're not just admitting your platform has issues. You're declaring the entire category fundamentally broken.

Here’s what I read between the lines:

“We’re giving up on fixing the old suite. We are going to rebuild it on a new technology platform.”

POW!

That's the ballgame. Thanks for coming.

The legacy Source-to-Pay Suite software category is dead, circa October 8^th, 2025.

In business, the Icarus paradox is hard to circumvent.

When you get out ahead and lead a market, you feel unstoppable.

You’re the world champ!

Then, eventually, your strengths become your weaknesses…

Your position starts to wane.

You’re still the world champ on paper, but things start feeling different because you haven’t booked your next fight!

You end up faced with 2 choices…

Frankly, I didn’t know if SAP Ariba would have #2 in them… Convincing the SAP C-Suite to invest in this reinvention was probably an epic battle on its own… SAP as a whole has so many competing priorities…

But as a past SAP consultant and 3^rd party observer of the ProcureTech market, I can’t help but be happy about this news.

More proper competition in this market means that ultimately, procurement wins.

Can Ariba actually deliver on this “next-gen promise”? Can they compete with platforms that already have a three-year head start on modern architecture?

You know as much as I do…

What we do know: they have deep pockets and finally seem willing to invest in solving the ProcureTech problem (albeit with a more SAP-centric approach).

As for Coupa and Ivalua? They've got a marketing problem brewing. When your biggest competitor publicly acknowledges their platform is obsolete and announces a complete rebuild, suddenly your own legacy code is in the spotlight too, justified or not!

Will S2P suite sales completely stop? Of course not. Enterprises move slowly. Long sales cycles. Risk-averse procurement.

Two things can be true at once: legacy deals will keep happening while a parallel market erupts.

But make no mistake: October 8^th 2025 was the inflection point.

The legacy Source-to-Pay suite had a good run.

Twenty-five years is a VERY long time in tech.

But it's over now.

The next 12-24 months will tell us whether the old guard can reinvent themselves…

Or if this was just their last gasp before the next generation takes over entirely.

Warm up the popcorn machine! 🍿🍿🍿

What's your take? Do I have a blind spot? Can the “legacy players” successfully rebuild, or is procurement headed for a complete platform revolution?

Hit reply or let me know in the comments.