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The Monthly Update

On 5 October 2026, ORO Labs announced that it had entered into an agreement with SAP for its procurement orchestration solution to be sold as a solution extension under the name SAP Ariba Procurement Orchestration by ORO Labs. According to the announcement, the offering is planned to be generally available by November 2026.

For those familiar with SAP’s procurement ecosystem, the announcement is notable but unsurprising. SAP has long offered strong procurement execution systems, yet historically lacked a flexible, enterprise-wide orchestration layer to coordinate Procurement, Legal, Finance, IT, Security, Risk and other stakeholders across diverse applications.

SAP Ariba Guided Buying improved the purchasing experience but remained primarily an entry point to SAP Ariba buying processes rather than an independent orchestration layer spanning the enterprise technology landscape.

SAP has been rebuilding* Ariba, embedding Joule across its applications, and expanding its capabilities through the WalkMe acquisition. SAP formally announced their own intake and orchestration (I&O) ambitions last year: SAP announced Ariba Intake Management in October 2024; however, it has yet to be effectively deployed across a broader on-premises infrastructure until now. Against this backdrop, reselling a third party’s orchestration capability under the SAP Ariba name shines light on where SAP believes its stack still falls short; or where it cannot move quickly enough on its own. With this announcement, my take is that SAP is shifting focus from developing a dedicated I&O solution independently.* (I wrote about the Ariba rebuild in detail in my previous newsletter: https://nprocurement.com/p/next-gen-sap-ariba-base-architecture.)

Here’s a high-level timeline of key developments of SAP I&O story since it was announced.

It is worth noting that ORO was available to SAP customers on SAP Store as a partner application for integration from November 2023 until last week.

SAP structures its partner relationships across several tiers.

At the broadest level, a partner application may be listed on SAP Store and sold directly by the partner, which retains ownership of the contract, commercial relationship and most support responsibilities. This was ORO’s status until the announcement.

At the next level, SAP recognises more established partner solutions through designations such as SAP Endorsed Apps, indicating a higher standard of validation.

A solution extension represents the most selective tier. It is SAP-branded, sold under an SAP contract and supported through SAP, after completing SAP’s qualification process before general availability (GA*). This is the new relationship. 

From a user experience (UX) perspective, a partner application launched from SAP Store often feels distinctly separate: users move into another product with different branding, design, login behaviour, and incident support. A solution extension, by contrast, is intended to feel native to SAP, with the boundaries largely invisible. Whether every solution extension achieves this is debatable, but the goal is a unified SAP experience rather than two products joined together.

From an integration perspective, partner apps from SAP Store integrate through published APIs like any other application, and the depth of that integration varies. Solution extensions are qualified by SAP, which, in principle, means the integration is tested and maintained against SAP’s own standards rather than left entirely to the partner. For an orchestration layer that must coordinate work across SAP and non-SAP systems, the depth and durability of that integration will matter greatly.

The SAP user experience with SAP partner extension applications is well illustrated by OpenText VIM over the years. With time, it has become so seamlessly embedded in the accounts payable processes of SAP ECC and S/4HANA that even experienced SAP users often assume it is a core SAP capability. A more recent example is the integration of Icertis Contract Management for contract authoring with the SAP Ariba Contracts module.

Intake is the front door. It is how a requester expresses a need, ideally in language that makes sense to them rather than to the procurement system. Orchestration is what happens next. It is the coordination of that request across policies, approvals, systems and people so that the right work happens in the right place, often invisibly to the person who raised it.

SAP has pieces that touch both, but they sit at different layers and were designed with different intent.

SAP Ariba Intake Management, announced as part of next-generation Ariba, is SAP’s own intake and workflow capability and comes with several promises. However, as I understand it, the solution is being developed outward from Ariba’s core themes and has yet to extend beyond the public cloud. This means much of the SAP ecosystem still operating on-premises is unlikely to benefit from SAP’s own I&O capabilities anytime soon. 

With Coupa acquiring Tonkean and Zip generating significant attention in the I&O market, it was only a matter of time before SAP made a major move.

The announcement is explicit that ORO provides orchestration and that it coordinates with Joule Work. It is far less explicit about where the intake experience ultimately lives in the SAP-branded product.

My reading, and I want to be clear this is interpretation rather than confirmed design, is that SAP intends the intake and engagement experience to remain within its own domain. That would mean Joule, the evolving Joule Work experience, next-generation SAP Ariba Intake Management, or some combination of them, continuing to serve as the front door for end users, with ORO operating as the orchestration layer behind that front door. The language in the announcement, particularly the phrase about Joule Work serving as the primary user engagement layer, points in that direction.

The announcement positions SAP Integration Suite as the foundation that supports integration orchestration, alongside ORO's pre-built connectors and APIs and its low-code and no-code workflow tooling. 

SAP Integration Suite is SAP’s current integration platform on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). It incorporates Cloud Integration Gateway capabilities that connect SAP Ariba’s buyer-side modules with back-end ERP systems and SAP Business Network. In broader terms, the partnership builds on the integration foundation towards which SAP has already been steering Ariba customers.

Because a solution extension is SAP-branded, sold and supported, the customer's primary commercial and support relationship runs through SAP rather than through ORO directly. That has genuine advantages. It means buying through an existing SAP relationship, a single contractual counterparty, and SAP's qualification process standing behind the offering.

It also raises questions that the announcement does not answer. The pricing metric is not public. Orchestration can be priced in several ways, by user, by transaction, by spend under management, and each scales very differently for a large enterprise. The dependency on SAP Integration Suite may carry its own licensing implications. The support model matters too, because even when SAP is the front line, the underlying engineering and roadmap sit with ORO, and customers will want clarity on escalation and on how roadmap decisions are made.

ORO already serves several major enterprise customers as a standalone vendor. For customers that already have both SAP and ORO in their IT landscape, what additional value does purchasing ORO through SAP offer over contracting with ORO directly? Tighter, SAP-supported integration across the SAP landscape is one plausible benefit. The question is: at what premium?

I keep coming back to SAP Ariba Guided Buying, a solution that I started implementing around 2016.

Looking back, I wonder whether Guided Buying was simply ahead of its time. It had several of the ingredients needed to evolve into a broader, enterprise-level source-to-pay intake portal. Notably, Sudhir Bhojwani and ORO’s founding team previously led the development of Guided Buying during their time at Ariba.

It had a flexible, drag-and-drop-style form builder with straightforward approval options. It surfaced catalogues, preferred and qualified suppliers, and procurement policies at the point of buying. Over time, it extended beyond the initial request into receiving, invoice creation, tactical sourcing, and a range of other options. Web jumper links allowed users to navigate directly to Ariba Contract, Sourcing, and Supplier Management creation pages from Guided Buying. That said, it remained largely anchored to the purchasing process and to Ariba’s own gravity.

Some of that is explained by timing. I&O was not yet a named category, user expectations had not been reset by consumer-grade software, and the prevailing conversation was still about consolidating spend onto Ariba rather than coordinating across many systems. Some of it is architectural, because a layer that genuinely treats the suite as one system among many is not a natural thing for a suite vendor to build.

That opportunity may have passed, but it offers a useful perspective on how SAP's approach to procurement intake and user experience has evolved. The instincts that sat inside Guided Buying a decade ago are recognisable in what SAP is now assembling through Joule, through next-generation Intake Management, and through this partnership. The difference is that the orchestration layer, the part that was hardest to build from inside the suite, is arriving with another company's name on the engine, from a team that includes former Ariba leaders who started that journey. 

According to Sudhir, the question is no longer how well users can navigate procurement systems, but how effectively those systems orchestrate work on the user’s behalf.

In terms of SAP UX evolution, the progression has moved from transaction-code interfaces to tile-based web applications and now towards conversational, agentic engagement, with orchestration, routing, approvals, and integration increasingly handled in the background.

The direction of travel is that the end user cares about the outcome and not the process, and the system is expected to coordinate the work on their behalf. 

This partnership is best understood as SAP acknowledging that the orchestration half of that equation is where it needed help and choosing to source it rather than wait to build it.

For procurement and IT leaders, the practical next step is to translate the announcement into the right questions.

Before committing to the architecture or licensing model, customers should seek clear answers to the following:

My overall read is that this partnership is significant, and that it was close to inevitable given the state of orchestration inside the SAP stack. 

SAP has strong pieces at the design, adoption, conversation and intake layers, but a genuinely vendor-neutral orchestration runtime that spans SAP and non-SAP systems is difficult for a suite vendor to build from the inside, both architecturally and commercially. Partnering with a company that built exactly that, and that was founded by people who came out of Ariba, is a pragmatic move.

For customers, the buying decision is expected to depend on their own business case and the complexity of the landscape.

A highly standardised next-generation SAP customer may eventually find native I&O capabilities sufficient. A global enterprise with fragmented ERP, procurement, and cross-functional systems is much more likely to benefit from the ORO layer. 

Disclosure: This article represents the understanding and views of the author at the time of writing. /n Procurement is an independent publication and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by SAP. Readers should independently validate all information provided before making any major business decisions. Use at your own risk.

#️⃣ Number of the Month
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SAP announced its own Ariba Intake Management in October 2024. Twenty-four months later, it's selling ORO Labs' orchestration engine under the Ariba name instead, which tells you how far the homegrown version got.

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