SAP Ariba Procurement Orchestration by ORO Labs, Explained

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In March, ORO Labs closed a $100 million Series C. The obvious reading was that ORO had raised a war chest to go win orchestration deals against everyone and replace established Source-to-Pay suites, SAP Ariba included.

Seven months later, SAP announced it will sell ORO's intake and orchestration solution on its own paper.

If you'd pitched me that sequence two years ago, I'd have asked for the deck and a strong coffee 😅

The short version:

Let's break down what was signed, why I think both sides wanted it, what it means for the vendors pitching you right now and what it means for you, the digital procurement pro.

Let's get into it.

Pins (📌) are used along the way to define technical terms and make this an easier read.

I've been following this storyline for a while:

→ January 2025:

I asked whether SAP Ariba was still king of the hill.

By market share, yes: SAP held 25.4% of a $5.9 billion market in 2023, and 94% of organizations use S2P platforms.

But according to PwC surveying, only 40% of procurement processes were digitalized, progress stalled between 2022 and 2024, and teams were targeting 70% by 2027 (ambitious, but not realistic IMHO… Especially with more of the same — S2P Suites).

But, I&O providers were starting to breathe down the necks of the established S2P suites as procurement was looking to close it’s capability gaps.

→ October 2025:

SAP announced Next-Gen Ariba, and I wrote the old S2P suite's obituary. GEP had replatformed by this point too.

Two of the biggest suites rebuilding from the ground up looked like a pattern to me, not a coincidence.

All the big suites had also announced I&O functionality or modules in the months around that announcement. These were the first signals that the "convergence" of the two software categories (S2P suites and I&O) was well underway.

→ February 2026:

First, Gartner included Zip, an "I&O-first" provider, in its S2P Suite Magic Quadrant for the first time ever. Another signal validating my convergence thesis.

Second, I sat down with Debadatta Dash to check in on Next-Gen Ariba. Deb's view: by late 2026 to early 2027, the SAP procurement apps portfolio would represent a substantial leap forward from the current version of Ariba.

I wondered aloud whether SAP Ariba would try to compete in accounts where SAP isn't the back-end ERP, given that I understood SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) to be a prerequisite for Next-Gen. (Spoiler: it isn’t. More on that below.)

(Deb has since launched /n Procurement, an SAP procurement newsletter I help with. You should subscribe. It’s free.)

→ May 2026:

Ariba competitor Coupa acquired I&O provider Tonkean, further validating the convergence thesis and putting pressure on every other S2P suite with I&O or agentic gaps to act. And based on market reaction, to act differently... Not just buy their own I&O provider…

And now this deal...

One more piece of context: this isn't a first date. ORO was founded by former SAP Ariba product leaders (CEO Sudhir Bhojwani was Ariba's chief product officer), it announced an Ariba integration back in 2023, and it has been listed as an extension on SAP's partner pages ever since. What's new is the level of commitment.

The new offer is called "SAP Ariba Procurement Orchestration by ORO Labs", with general availability (GA) planned for November 2026.

Here's what it covers, as I understand it:

→ One SKU: intake & orchestration. It does not include ORO's sourcing, contracting, invoice management, supplier management or TPRM capabilities, the module-like functionalities that compete head-on with Ariba applications. ORO keeps selling those on its own.

→ No exclusivity. ORO is still ready, willing and able to sell deals that have nothing to do with SAP.

→ A solution extension, not a partnership. A partnership is mostly a press release with good intentions. Both sides promise to help each other in the market, and it can fizzle out fast if there's nothing behind it. With a solution extension, SAP sells the product on its own paper and supports the integration across current and next-generation Ariba, as well as Joule Work, SAP's AI engagement layer. SAP has skin in the game, contractually and operationally.

Chris Vessey's graphic is the clearest picture of the setup I've seen:

Note: You can use other intake methods/tools than Joule as well (ORO intake, something else…)

So why would both sides sign up for this? Let's start with SAP.

When SAP announced Next-Gen Ariba, I assumed it was mostly a play for “SAP-first” companies, meaning those running ECC or S/4HANA as the core ERP, with BTP as the main integration layer. My reasoning was architectural: Next-Gen Ariba is built on SAP’s own platform (BTP, now part of the SAP Business AI Platform, or BAIP), so I figured you’d need that platform to run it.

SAP has since clarified this.

Next-Gen Ariba is “SAP-managed.” SAP builds it on BAIP (eating its own “infrastructural dog food”), but the customer doesn’t need a BAIP license or deployment to get Next-Gen Ariba. You could run an Oracle ERP for finance and still use Next-Gen Ariba on top.

Where it gets confusing: customers can also license BAIP themselves to build extensions for their own ERP, in line with SAP’s “clean core” concept. That’s “customer-managed.” Two different things. There are synergies if you build custom extensions to Next-Gen Ariba on BAIP, but it’s optional.

Bottom line: Next-Gen Ariba isn’t reserved for SAP-first shops. It certainly makes more sense in an SAP shop, but Next-Gen Ariba may be able to compete in accounts running other ERPs too. That is *if* Next-Gen functionality eventually starts to look attractive vs. the rest of the market.

One thing SAP’s clarification doesn’t change: Next-Gen Ariba is still a migration. No BAIP license required, sure. But moving from current-gen Ariba to a re-platformed product still means moving your data, rebuilding configurations and integrations, retesting and retraining. Hold that thought.

What about Ariba’s own intake management features, announced in October 2024? SAP is discontinuing SAP Ariba Intake Management two years after release. Intake will be available by default to all SAP Ariba customers through Joule Work instead. As I see it, this aligned with my hypothesis that “Intake” is being commoditized as a capability AND every function in the business needing it (HR, Finance, Sales, etc.). We must always remember that SAP considerations are much wider than just procurement.

In other words, SAP now treats intake as something the core UI should have for every function. What this ORO deal seems to indicate is that the SAP stack doesn’t orchestrate/play well with everything else you run outside the SAP ecosystem.

And very few companies are truly "SAP-only, end-to-end" (if any…). M&A always ends up messing that vision up 😂

So, ultimately, an next-gen procurement platform working toward feature parity, architected for AI, on a purpose-built integration layer, is a fine thing for SAP to have. But, it still leaves them with two sticky problems:

So for the procurement portfolio specifically, I think SAP was looking for a fix to these two thorny problems.

I&O vendors have typically packaged the integration platform and the intake and orchestration functionality together. That's the core promise of the orchestration piece: an integration layer to coordinate processes across a heterogeneous tech stack with a built-in application layer to eliminate the manual, "swivel-chair" gaps that always open up between other functional applications.

That promise landed hard with procurement teams over the last few years. Procurement I&O vendors started signing massive clients and deals. They also offered a significant side benefit: decoupling business transformation from technology upgrades.

Chris Vessey put it well recently. With a couple of tweaks (couldn't help myself): "You [shouldn't need] to stop [or slow down] the business while you modernize the [underlying IT] architecture."

The result was a wave of innovation in ProcureTech. Established S2P providers were caught flat-footed and finally started ramping up the pace of innovation... As a result, it's never been more fun to work in and follow this space for ProcureTech geeks like me.

But the leading I&O vendors also figured something out along the way. Owning the front door (intake) and the glue (orchestration) doesn't make you sticky. (Pun intended.)

Doors and glue can be swapped for another brand, eventually at least (this segment is still young). And there's no shortage of doors and glue out there: Pegasystems, Appian and others have sold them for years. Procurement only woke up to the concept recently because someone applied domain expertise and messaging to it. Doors and glue FOR procurement.

("Wow! Someone finally cares about us!")

Better get sticky before buyers notice 😂

In my humble opinion, two moves.

First: build module-like functionality and drift into S2P suite territory. You stop coordinating the work and start owning the workflows where the work happens: sourcing, contracting, Supplier Relationship Management (SRM), Third Party Risk Management (TPRM)... even becoming a Procure-to-Pay (P2P) system of record, if your stomach is strong enough. The target is the Ariba, Coupa and GEP installed base and “net new ProcureTech virgins”, precisely because those suites are so hard to rip out once they're in.

Second: build unique data sets and industry expertise that produce better outcomes than generic solutions and competitors can.

Then a new force went mainstream in November 2022 (👋 ChatGPT): large language models, and the promise of AI agents.

LLMs are showing us that intake and orchestration and the functional workflow are all trending toward commodity status. Give someone an LLM, a general understanding of the process (say, running an RFP) and decent inputs and rules, and they'll get a decent result with minimal effort, expertise or expense. Give that LLM a basic harness and you can start getting those results at scale (multi-player instead of single player, as Brajan Gatys put it to me so beautifully). It’s not perfect but keeps getting better year-over-year.

I believe LLMs themselves are trending toward commodity status too. There are 100+ providers worldwide, open-weight models deliver outstanding results at a fraction of frontier prices, and better models ship every week. I covered this on the podcast earlier this summer.

My prediction: long term, LLMs become utilities, like phone lines or internet access. We pay per token today, the same way we used to pay per phone minute while providers amortized their capex. Eventually, it becomes commodity pricing.

So in a world where intake, orchestration and workflow execution are all drifting towards commoditization, what stays valuable? Where can a software vendor hold margin over the long run?

Break any business process into its parts and you get five elements:

Input, execution and systems are the parts I believe are getting commoditized as we move forward. That leaves data and the guides as the differentiators influencing the quality of the output. Which gives you two ways (OK, three) to build a durable competitive advantage:

With that context, here’s what I think SAP Ariba is admitting: its own intake product wasn’t going to catch the pure plays, nor was it going to compete on non-SAP orchestration with BTP, so it’s retiring that strategy... Basic intake becomes a default in Joule Work, and SAP leans on ORO for richer intake plus orchestration across non-SAP systems.

ORO solves both problems at once:

→ Problem #1, the migration: ORO decouples business transformation from the technical upgrade. Customers can modernize the user experience and processes now, on current-gen Ariba, and move to Next-Gen at their own pace, without the "let's re-evaluate the whole suite" moment. They can keep the technical debt without it becoming a blocker… 😅

→ Problem #2, the non-SAP systems: look at the bottom slice of bread in that sandwich graphic. ORO brings the connectors and the delivery experience across heterogeneous landscapes, so SAP doesn't have to.

Remember my February skepticism about SAP competing in accounts that aren't SAP first? Turns out the barrier I assumed doesn’t exist. And with ORO handling the non-SAP plumbing, SAP is now much better equipped to compete in those accounts.

Timing mattered too. Ariba was losing the PR war by building I&O itself, years after new entrants had established the category. And direct competitors were moving: Coupa, for one, picked up Tonkean. They were definitely looking to react, but with a different strategy.

Why ORO, out of all the leading I&O vendors? There are probably plenty of political considerations behind the deal that I'm not aware of, but looking strictly at product, my hypothesis is that it's one of the few leading I&O vendors that hasn't built (and isn't building) a transactional P2P system of record for indirect purchasing, meaning the PR → approval → PO → GR → invoice 3-way match flow. And it doesn't look like it will in the short term.

(To be precise: ORO does sell invoice management functionality, and recently showed email intake for invoices. So the line isn’t perfectly clean. But it doesn’t run the requisition-to-PO-to-receipt backbone. That still lives in your ERP or P2P suite.)

That positioning separates ORO from a Zip, a Vertice or a Pivot, which ARE building their own P2P systems of record in addition to supporting P2P-adjacent use cases and creating data assets.

When it comes to the P2P process, ORO ONLY orchestrates processes adjacent to P2P systems of record for both direct and indirect use cases, like with its agentic PR review use case.

One could imagine other scenarios, like:

Note: These use cases are also candidates for any other I&O / best-of-breed provider who wants to develop them, to be clear.

You now understand that ORO depends on being installed on top of one or more transactional systems of record (a P2P platform, an S2P suite and/or an ERP) to deploy these use cases.

On the other hand, other I&O vendors have barely hidden their S2P suite replacement ambitions. So if you're Ariba and you're going to "let a fox into the henhouse," better if it's actually a dog 😂 And better still if it's a familiar one: ORO's leadership literally built parts of Ariba's product.

Sure, Ariba and ORO will still compete on the source-to-contract modules (sourcing, contracts, SRM, TPRM). But I've always seen P2P as the real high-TCV, sticky prize. (It's also the hardest to get right and implement, by the way.)

Why a solution extension instead of an acquisition? SAP could have bought ORO, or someone else, to achieve the same thing. But that would mean six to eight months of due diligence while valuations and markets move. A solution extension solves the problem right now, puts a slice of the category's revenue on SAP's books immediately, keeps a would-be competitor close, differentiates vs Coupa’s strategy and lets SAP test its acquisition assumptions in the weeds of joint sales and operations.

Say what you want about the move... you can't give SAP grief for being slow and then give it grief for moving. The only worry is the adjustment time while everyone in SAP sales and product figures out all the implications… And learns how to correctly discuss this with clients.

ORO raised $100 million in its March Series C. That's a lot of money, and it implies a very high valuation. If my thesis is correct and ORO isn't out to replace S2P suites or ERPs, what justifies the investment? How does it grow into that valuation?

Maybe the deal gets ORO into accounts it couldn't reach on its own, and that's enough. Possible. But giving up margin on every joint deal looks shortsighted as the whole explanation (I may also just be underestimating the math…).

Time for my tinfoil hat. (I have zero inside knowledge here.) 😅

Maybe this partnership, or a vision for it, was already in the works when ORO raised?

If you master procurement orchestration, why not HR orchestration? IT orchestration? Sales orchestration? The same dynamics play out in every business function. SAP runs a fragmented portfolio of functional SaaS across the enterprise: Fieldglass, Concur, SuccessFactors, Hybris and more. If this concept works in procurement, what's to stop something like ORO from becoming the heterogeneous integration layer for every function in the business?

And it's not a threat to SAP, because it stays out of system of record functionality… if my logic holds, that is.

There's one more way to get sticky I haven't covered yet: breadth. The number of stakeholders and operations running on your product and the number of connected systems. Once you hold a critical mass of people's habits and enterprise interfaces, change gets much harder. You become the "enterprise platform" IT imposes on everyone else in the name of consolidation and simplicity. It would also blow up the TAM and ROI math compared to selling only to procurement teams.

(It’s how Anthropic and OpenAI are trying to generate staying power in the LLM market… And why they are currently reportedly selling/operating with massive losses. By getting you hooked on their LLM cheaply.)

Layer in the integrations and data sources ORO actually needs to deliver on the "idea-to-pay" concept it's been pushing, and it starts to look like a plausible end game.

(I'll actually have ORO come on the podcast to get details on my theories in the next few weeks. Follow our YouTube channel if you don't want to miss it.)

The best way to side step direct competitors is to just start playing a different game.

Call me crazy. Maybe I just gave them the idea…

For this to be viable though, delivery and execution have to be absolutely on point… And that's never a given. More on that next week…

Six takeaways for your next ProcureTech decision, from how to frame it to what to protect:

1. Treat the P2P system of record and the P2P experience layer as two separate decisions.

They have different lifespans, different selection criteria and different switching costs. Your P2P system of record is a 10-year, compliance-heavy choice. Your intake and orchestration “experience layer” that sits on top should be faster to change and easier to swap. Evaluate them on different criteria and different timelines.

2. Don't take "we don't want to replace your suite" at face value.

Every I&O vendor says publicly that it only wants to close the gaps in your existing tech investments. It wants to play nice with your existing S2P suite or ERP.

I've been calling BS on that for years.

Why land if you don't plan to expand? Intake and orchestration gets the vendor in the door. Better module-like functionality than the incumbent, deployed over time, grows the account. Becoming the end-to-end, agentic procurement context layer is the end goal. But to get there, the vendor has to earn your trust first… So closing gaps is the way in.

The proof is on their websites:

→ Zip built its name on indirect-only purchasing businesses (SaaS, banking, insurance). It's now pitching (and delivering) governed workflows for indirect, MRO and capital spend, and its own FAQ says it can replace your S2P suite or sit on top of it. My bet for them: direct purchasing support on top of ERP (raw and semi-finished materials, plus MRP integration) comes next, similar to the use cases I outlined above.

→ Vertice lists procure-to-pay as a capability and recently released ANA, its autonomous negotiation agent. It’s also continually expanding its footprint.

→ Pivot isn't even coy about it. It runs a whole "Retiring Coupa" series on its blog.

→ Levelpath, Omnea and Opstream all now list P2P capabilities on their websites.

The clearest signal that a vendor wants to replace your suite (or become your first end-to-end procurement platform) is P2P on its capability list. Whether it can handle the complexity of P2P in your organization is another story... but I digress.

New Gen platforms' biggest advantage over established players? A modern tech stack, a single data model and a single code base.

You can actually use this to your advantage. Having 2 competing software vendors behind your walls will create lots of commotion... But it also creates competition and gives you options to deliver on your internal promises.

3. But "we don't want to replace your suite/ERP" can also be true.

Given this announcement, I believe ORO when it says it doesn't want to replace your suite or ERP. It will keep expanding, of course, just not in the same direction as the others.

There are a few other vendors I track with this same "S2P/ERP complementary" profile (no P2P replacement, built to work alongside, before or after your existing transactional systems; check their websites to see what I mean):

→ Focal Point, focused on category management as its next expansion (no P2P)

→ Tropic, which positions its requests as feeding POs into your existing P2P tool

And for complementing, not replacing, in SAP environments specifically:

→ ConvergentIS (though I'm fairly certain it can support indirect P2P and replace a S2P suite completely if you need it to)

→ BeNeering

4. If you already have an established suite or ERP, one question remains: can it make the jump to the AI era? Where are the proof points?

For Ariba, Coupa, Ivalua, GEP, Zycus, Jaggaer and the rest, this is still the biggest open question. Vendors end up replatforming because supporting LLM calls at scale while providing desired results is hard. And it gets harder:

→ the more fragmented the solution and data model

→ the more process logic lives in UI configuration instead of a headless process

→ the more closed the platform (no solid APIs)

→ the more client-specific customization it has to carry

→ the more audit trails depend on clicks instead of API calls

→ the older the infrastructure

→ the more the platform was sized for batch jobs instead of continuous agent calls

→ the more user management is about humans instead of other systems

Bring that list to your next vendor review. Every line is a question you can ask.

One of the reasons the "new gen" vendors are making headway is that established ones can't modernize fast enough to support the agentic paradigm.

That's what "agentic first" actually means.

5. If you run current-gen Ariba, you now have a third option.

Until now, if you wanted to keep up with the SAP parade without a new vendor, the choice was "migrate to Next-Gen" or "re-tender the whole suite." Now you can modernize the front end first and migrate the system of record later while contracting with a single entity.

Before you sign though, ask:

→ who handles first-line support, SAP or ORO?

→ what are the SLAs and escalation paths?

→ how does pricing on SAP paper compare to buying from ORO directly?

→ what happens to your workflows if the partnership ends?

→ if you already run ORO standalone, does moving to SAP paper help or hurt you?

6. Make your "context layer" portable.

Your policies, category strategies, approval rules and playbooks are the asset every vendor wants to own as your "agentic procurement context layer". Document them outside any one tool, and make sure they can be exported and accessed through open APIs or MCP, not locked inside one vendor's configuration screens.

People often ask me how the market leaders differ. Today, there's still PLENTY of differentiation (even though this article has presented oversimplified, neat and tidy categories). There are lots of nuances that only become important once you look at vendors through the lens of your own spend profile (e.g. are you buying a ton of professional services? Or mostly MRO parts?).

And, we haven't yet arrived at the future I describe… But this deal is one more piece of evidence that we're slowly moving toward it.

Every end-to-end platform provider seems to be racing to become your "Agentic Procurement Context Layer." This deal is SAP trying to make sure it stays in the race as a viable option, and ORO trying to further differentiate in a competive market while getting engaged but not married.

Here's where I believe this goes after S2P and I&O convergence. Doors are getting cheap. Glue is getting cheap. Workflows are getting cheap. What stays expensive is your data, your governance and your context. Those are the differentiators for outputs/outcomes.

So whoever you trust with those three, make sure they bring real procurement domain expertise, on their teams and baked into their products, not just generic operational technology. And make sure you can take your context with you if you ever leave.

Own your data, your governance rules and your context. Rent everything else.

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