E-Procurement service provider MarketMile LLC announced today the acquisition of spend analysis software maker Aentropy.
While specific terms of the deal were not disclosed, officials said the acquisition will take effect immediately, with MarketMile purchasing all of the shares of Aentropy in exchange for an unspecified amount of MarketMile stock and cash.
Ruby Sahiwal, co-founder of Aentropy, will join MarketMile as its COO. Sahiwal served previously as COO at VerticalNet Solutions, a competitor to Aentropy in the spend management market.
Founded by American Express, MarketMile is a supplier network providing businesses with access to indirect procurement suppliers that offer such goods as office products, MRO [maintenance, repair and operations materials] and computer hardware and software.
Steve Savignano, acting CEO at MarketMile, in Mountain View, Calif., said the acquisition of Aentropy will allow MarketMile to significantly increase its footprint in the spend management technology market.
Aentropys spend analysis software, delivered as a Web service, helps companies gather, cleanse, categorize and structure data from multiple sources including accounts payable and general ledger data files.
The softwares reporting tools also provide a dashboard that allows users to monitor and control spending.
Both companies have been working together for the past two months to integrate their technology, embedding Aentropys spend management solution into the MarketMile e-procurement platform.
The integrated platform is currently in pilot and will be available in the third quarter of this year, officials said.
The new platform will be met with stiff competition, most notably from Ariba Inc., which has staked its e-commerce company on the spend management philosophy – and architected its software around the concept that companies want and need to manage and leverage their enterprise-wide spend for improvements on the bottom line.
Ariba, of Sunnyvale, Calif., announced the current iteration of its spend management software last February.
The next generation of the Ariba Spend Management suite, due this fall, will come with enhanced team-based collaboration capabilities, allowing users to collaborate outside the firewall to include, for example, engineers and suppliers in the sourcing process.
For communication inside the firewall, version 2.0 will add scalability enhancements like multiple CPU capabilities and improved search capabilities.
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