Ariba, which recently went public, had revenue of $11.9 million in the second quarter, an increase of 376% year over year. It recorded an operating loss of $6 million and a net loss of $11.3 million. A year ago, the company lost $2.6 million from operations.

Ariba president and CEO Keith Krach says he's not concerned about competition from traditional procurement application vendors such as SAP and Oracle, which have recently announced plans to offer products for purchasing supplies online. "They're just beginning the shift from client-server to network applications, while we've been at it for three years," he says. This week, Ariba will announce the addition of IT reseller Inacom Corp. to its Ariba.com network of suppliers.

Krach says 39 large companies have either a plan to use or have implemented Ariba's application for procuring nonproduction supplies over the Web. "More and more companies are focusing on reducing their operating costs, and we believe that our solutions have furthered that," Krach says.

Parsons Brinckerhoff will roll out Clarus' E-Procurement application to 4,000 employees by mid-2000. The company will deploy the application in about 250 offices nationwide and integrate it with its Oracle enterprise resource planning applications.

Office Depot, which has been selling to the state of Utah via eMall, sells about $100 million worth of goods to various government agencies each year and would like to move that business to the Web. "Massachusetts is on the the leading edge in terms of implementing Web-based procurement," says Monica Luechtefeld, VP of marketing in the $2 billion business-services division of Office Depot. "I've seen it at the federal level, but not the state." Intelisys Electronic Commerce LLC supplies the software and services for eMall.

In other news, Commerce One Inc. revealed that PeopleSoft, NTT Communications, and Singapore Telecom will invest $20 million in the procurement app and services vendor. All three companies have technology partnerships with Commerce One to create a global trading site for business buyers and sellers on the Web. PeopleSoft's online procurement application is based on Commerce One technology.