From 2005-2007 I worked at Ariba, Inc as a Technical Writer. Being the youngest and most technical member of their documentation team, a good amount of work naturally fell to me.

One of my biggest projects for Ariba was to write a guide for one of their new projects ("Ariba QuickSource") from scratch. This was the 248 page "Ariba QuickSource Business User Guide."

Ariba Quicksource is 'reverse auction' software for large companies. Basically, say that you are Microsoft, and you want to buy pencils for your organization. Rather than walking down to OfficeMax, instead, call all of the pencil manufacturers in the US, and invite them to participate in an auction for your pencil business.

Since you want to buy so many pencils, these pencil suppliers should theoretically be desperate for your business, so you will get a better price!

Or, at least that is the theory. Anyways, a part of Ariba's business is organizing these auctions. And how else to do them but online? So that is what "Enterprise Reverse Auction Software" does.