Hi Santosh,
In Ariba as far as i know from a technical perspective there is hardly anything which is done by the Consultants who are from the Services industry. During implementation of the Ariba Cloud solution, it is normally Ariba who would be doing the initial build and hosting it in one of the data centers for a client. Yes we might have to work on building the client requirements on how the business process would shape up. But if you re comparing it to SAP then yes there would be a marked difference between how a technical person functions in SAP and what his role would be in Ariba (minimal).For any screen changes and parameter changes we have to raise a SR / CR to Ariba and have to provide support to them to get those things done. So technically it would be Ariba which is the focal point here.
So i think in Ariba we can position ourselves as the Functional Consultant who would be well aware of the business process and who can liaise with Ariba and the customer to deliver the required business processes. There are various other things which a Ariba Consultant would be dealing with like testing, configurations in Ariba, integration perspective between Ariba and ERP system, data migration between ERP and Ariba etc.
And yes there is nothing like transactions to be run in Ariba like in SAP as Ariba is more of Self Service option for the buyers and it is self explanatory. So we may not have to remember a lot of t-codes and reports etc like in SAP.
So as we see in most of the courses it would tell you about how the particular processes / activities are performed in Ariba and maybe more in depth information which would help you in mapping the client requirements to Ariba in the initial business blueprint phases.
These are just my views having worked in the Ariba solution but yes other might have some different viewpoint.
Regards
Pramod