According to Ariba, their supplier network now handles between 20 million purchases orders worth $60bn to $70bn annually. With today’s announcement, non-Ariba customers can join the supplier network.

But it’s not cheap. They can buy an adapter for Ariba’s C-XML language roughly $50,000, or paying Ariba $20,000 to certify homegrown versions. Clearly, the announcement is aimed at large organizations requiring more streamlined, consolidated enterprise procurement.

Ariba, which began life as an e-procurement application and B2B exchange during the dot com boom, has repositioned itself in recent years as a spend management system that operates atop an e-procurement network hub. Today its business is roughly 40% hosted, 40% services, and 20% for companies licensing the software to operate their own procurement hubs behind their own firewalls.

Although the company just finished a challenging quarter where losses (along with revenues) increased, it boasts a number of significant deals, according to CEO Bob Calderoni in an earnings statement released last week.

Since it opened the supplier network as an official business last fall, it claims to have signed up roughly 90% of suppliers who were participating previously. The charges, at a nominal $500/relationship, only apply to supply relationships involving at least $25,000 annual value or over 15 document types.

By extending the procurement offering, Ariba is further trying to further cement itself as a best of breed provider. According to Bob Solomon, general manager of the Ariba supplier Network, the offering is aimed at SAP or Oracle customers who have not done well with their ERP vendor’s supplier portals, which he claims are typically customized for each buyer in the organization.

Companies don’t want to have deal with customized portals, hundreds of times per day, Solomon said.

Comparing itself to grand Central, which offers a web-services based electronic trading hub, Ariba claims its CXML-based procurement offering is far simpler. You have to be a very sophisticated supplier to use it, he said.