Ariba Reviews

Pros

Good work life balance. Competitive salaries.

Cons

Old technology. Learning new tech is not easily possible

Advice to Senior Management

Not proactive

Pros

- Decent work, not very technically challenging though. Everything is based on age old frameworks which are specific to their stack
- Get to learn how to manage work with the absolute minimum resources
- Fantastic process framework, a little too rigid on it though
- Good management events, only on weekends though
- A few fun filled events, again reserved for weekends or after work hours
- Get a good feel for time management after hours that is. 8 hours a day in meetings for all managers, you need to put in that extra effort if you want to even respond to emails

Cons

- Escalations, more escalations and lots more escalations. Half the time, the catalogs will be down, data loads will be failing, and the ops team will be more than happy to call you up anytime during their day (your 2/3 AM) to help resolve it. During their night they setup page filters so that their beauty sleep is not disturbed. And just so you get a good feel for it, they make sure they repeat this cycle every single day of the week. If you are on call for that week, you are rogered.
- Huge amount of bureaucracy to get anything done
- If you want a decent hike or a promotion, put in your papers and suddenly you realize there is a "HR team"
- Can never trust the senior management.
- You are a resource and a very lowly one at that. Obviously, HR has very little say in the process.
- You need to work 14+ hours to stay afloat most times.

Advice to Senior Management

Learn to respect folks and recognize them for that they are

Pros

Very friendly environment. Leader in spend management.

Cons

More focused towards the Ariba product.

Pros

Stable company,Good Salary,Good facilities at office location.Good company to work if you are functional person.If you want to make a career in support and maintenance this is the right place for you.

Cons

It only bug fixing and support all round the year.
Not for technical people as hardly any developer writes code here.Its mostly with customization.
The technology stack is all legacy and completely outdated ,plus you hardly get to any programming here.
Work pressure is also high with lot of micro management and day-day tracking by mangers.
This company has lot of managers who have no clue about any latest technologies or technology stack just meant for tracking bugs and issues.

Advice to Senior Management

India IDC gets only maintenance and support work ,which has to be changed.Deadlines of work need to be relaxed a little further for better work-life balance.

Pros

Ariba offers a lot of opportunities for flex time. It's a great place to be if you have a family.

Cons

The organization can be siloed. People are not very open unless they are part of the same team. It can be hard to get to know people outside of your team.

Advice to Senior Management

Management should focus on finding easier ways to communicate the complex nature of Ariba's products and services to its customers.

Pros

Good pay and overall compensation package
Company has excellent leadership and laser focus
Majority of employees are excellent or competent

Cons

Fast paced, need to pick up quickly for new hires
Long hours are not uncommon
Slow to adopt new ideas

Advice to Senior Management

The company is in good shape. But could use more startup mentality. Give employees some freedom to try new ideas, explore better ways of doing things, etc

Pros

Smart people
Process oriented (can be a con)
Good compensation and benefit, 4 weeks vacation + 1 week Christmas break

Cons

The company is stuck with 10 year old technology stack with ill-documented proprietary frameworks. What you learn is mostly only applicable to Ariba. Not much interesting stuff is going on. The company is not really innovative. People seem busy but they are not producing much. This is a quite boring place.

Advice to Senior Management

Find a way to innovate. It's not easy given the budgetary constraints, but as time goes by, the proprietary stuff will only get more out-dated. Company will have hard time attracting and retaining people.

Pros

- colleagues are generally nice and competent people
- new campus with lots of parking and free drinks
- weekly informal get-together

Cons

- product is married to a proprietary technology stack that is hard to learn, poorly documented, and has a limited feature set
- aversion to open source, with a strong not-invented-here mentality (Ariba Web does not count)
- open hostility towards engineering practices like test automation, code coverage, etc. that do not directly correlate to new or better features
- outdated engineering processes

Advice to Senior Management

From an engineering perspective, spend some time to clean up your technical debt and embrace modern engineering processes

From a management perspective, please don't drive your engineers to work nights and weekends.

Pros

A lot to learn, very transparent management

Cons

Some processes are too much to follow

Advice to Senior Management

with strict processes, innovative ideas are suppressed.

Pros

Great working environment and atmosphere
Friendly and nice people not just in this location but worldwide
Good wages, very good benefit's package, incl. company shares, meal vouchers, health care)
Regular wage increases, annual bonuses
Possibility to work from home
Very good relations between HR, employees and managers
Motivating their people, recognizing good job done

Cons

On some positions people were over-qualified, they felt little underestimated or were not fully utilizing their skills and experience
Sometimes typical" consulting" approach - selling things good for profit but not necessarily the best for client, sometimes more about powerpoint slides than about work itself.
Little training possibilities
Knowledge sharing poor in several areas