As the chief product officer for our spend management solutions, I am proud to share that Gartner has recognized SAP as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Source to Pay Suites.
This recognition, we believe, is a testament to our unwavering commitment to delivering innovative, comprehensive solutions that empower businesses to optimize procurement processes and enhance bottom-line results.
We feel it serves as validation for the strength of SAP Ariba offerings, and our continued focus on delivering experiences premised on data, intelligence, and suite. We believe that in a dynamic and unpredictable world, a partner with the breadth and depth of SAP is uniquely positioned to unleash success on these principles across your business, and we are humbled by this recognition.
SAP’s source-to-pay offerings and investment focus areas
SAP Ariba has been a leader in the development of cloud-based technologies that help buyers and suppliers collaborate to unleash the power of procurement. As the first product to offer these services in a multitenant cloud framework, SAP Ariba has developed deep functionality to handle complexity, while its focus on user experience has enabled simplicity. This has allowed an offering that can span all industries, all geographies, and all spend types. Our global customer base is proof of this achievement.
Our future focus is on ongoing innovation and improvement across our portfolio. Building use cases for intelligence is at the heart of our product strategy and defines the next generation of user experience for our products. Unparalleled applications in spend management have enabled our globally diverse customers to bring all spend under management: direct, indirect, MRO, and services. This provides the world’s largest, unmatched dataset for procurement and is the fuel for the delivery of an unrivaled AI roadmap.
SAP’s AI copilot Joule simplifies complex tasks across the source-to-pay process. Each use case has been built to enhance productivity, allowing procurement organizations to achieve more with less. Joule’s agentic AI framework will be directly applicable and available for spend applications from SAP, allowing customers to build agents that can operate on data from across their business landscape.
While companies today are sometimes told to mind their business, SAP realizes that no business does business alone. Our product road map is predicated on collaborative trading partner experiences through SAP Business Network, the largest supplier network in the industry, operational in 190 countries. This is exemplified by SAP Ariba Category Management, a new product built with an AI-first mindset. Its category agents have value because they are business network-aware and process-aware; the product is integrated across the network and source-to-pay suite, as it helps develop a category strategy and then monitors execution.
SAP Spend Control Tower offers comprehensive visibility across all spend systems, with zero integration effort for data originating from SAP cloud ERP solutions, SAP Ariba solutions, SAP Fieldglass solutions, or SAP Concur solutions. Broadly speaking, this is fundamental to the overall strategy for SAP Business Data Cloud, ensuring all business applications speak the same language and enabling an unrivaled AI roadmap for the SAP Business Suite.
At the same time, SAP recognizes that the world of software applications is heterogenous. Our own application partner network is continuously expanding. And while SAP won’t develop capabilities to solve every problem, our customers still want an orchestrated suite experience, even when non-SAP products are involved in the workflow. That is why we have invested in the development of SAP Ariba Intake Management. Businesses need to automate procurement requests with one common workflow, regardless of how many applications are involved. And where SAP applications are involved, this suite experience is increasingly in-built, again with zero effort required for integration. Capabilities from SAP Fieldglass and SAP Taulia are being directly embedded into SAP Ariba to provide a unified experience.
Real-world impact
The power of source-to-pay solutions from SAP is best illustrated through the experiences of our customers. American Eagle Outfitters (AEO), a global specialty retailer, faced challenges in managing its high volume of suppliers and invoices. By implementing SAP Business Network and SAP Ariba solutions, AEO achieved 85 percent purchase order compliance (five percent above target), 75 percent invoice-count compliance for 48,000 annual invoices, and over $780 million in spend transacting on SAP Business Network.
Nick Bonacci, senior manager of Procure-to-Pay Services at AEO, noted, “SAP Ariba solutions and SAP Business Network help AEO simplify our procure-to-pay processes in several key ways. Through the use of SAP’s intuitive applications, compliant purchasing protocols are now embedded into our broader organization, helping us maximize cost savings, optimize working capital, and strengthen vendor relationships.”
Similarly, Adani Enterprises Limited, implemented SAP Business Network and SAP Ariba solutions, achieving 94 percent first-time-right invoices in digital channels, 4,000 hours saved in one year in processing invoices, and over 8.5 million pieces of paper saved in one year with supplier digitalization.
Mukesh Ralhan, group head of Business Excellence and Strategic Initiatives at Adani, commented, “We process close to 100,000 purchase orders every year, with more than US$20 billion of spend. That’s huge for a company. Without SAP software such as SAP Ariba solutions supporting a single platform, that would not be possible.”
Looking ahead
SAP remains dedicated to delivering solutions that help businesses navigate the complexities of modern procurement. Our focus on customer success, coupled with our deep industry expertise and innovative technology, positions us to continue leading the way in source-to-pay solutions.
Learn more about source-to-pay solutions from SAP here.
Read the full Gartner Magic Quadrant for Source to Pay Suites report.
Manoj Swaminathan is president and chief product officer for SAP Intelligent Spend Management and Application Foundation Services at SAP.
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The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Source to Pay Suites report document is available here.
