We heard this morning that Justin Sadler-Smith has left SAP Ariba where he was head of UK & Ireland, Ariba Cloud Procurement, to become General Manager at Basware, Finnish giant of the global networked purchase-to-pay solutions, e-invoicing and financing services market.
This is hugely exciting news and will cause some procurement ears to prick up this morning as news breaks, we are sure. We are delighted for Justin and for Basware and will watch with interest how the new partnership develops, but we’ll keep one eye on SAP Ariba too to see how they fill the gap.
His reasons for making the move have not been revealed but Justin has promised Spend Matters his first interview once his feet are firmly under the Basware table. So watch this space as they say.
In the meantime he told us this:
“I am truly excited to be joining Basware and leveraging their innovations to help the business and drive shareholder value from the Procurement and Finance functions. The next 12-24 months will prove to be a pivotal time as these functions further digitise their processes and upskill their staff to more strategic roles. Basware is ideally placed to be at the forefront of their transformation.”
Jusin has already updated his LinkedIn profile, so take a look at that here. But in a nutshell:
Sadler-Smith is well known to many in the procurement world, on both the practitioner and solution provider side of the table, because of his many years with firms such as Manugistics, Emptoris and then IBM post the Emptoris acquisition. He ran the government sector for Emptoris with considerable success from 2006-10 then held senior sales and general management roles at Emptoris, moving into IBM after the 2012 deal.
He moved out of our sector in 2016 to Duetto, an interesting software business in the travel industry, where he was EMEA sales VP, and then on to SAP Ariba. Suffice to say his 20+ years of procurement and supply expertise will be a great move for Basware, we wish them both success.
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