We know about the dusty little secret that companies grapple with on a daily basis — The process for buying products and services – whether you call it e-procurement or spend management – is broken at most companies.

But Coupa is a 5 year old company with over 200 customers. We’re growing like mad. We’re disrupting (also like mad). Still, we’re the new guy. On the other hand, IBM has been around for 100 years, has 426,751 employees and revenue of $99.9 billion (now there’s a number that begs to be rounded off).

So when IBM decides to invest in the space called spend management, it delivers a form of validation that companies need help managing their spend, and recognition that the old way – hello Ariba – simply doesn’t work. Sure, we already know this because we’re continually displacing Ariba and see this trend only gaining momentum in the coming year. To borrow from Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean, “we’re traveling full speed with the wind in our sails.”

But again, now we have IBM saying we’re changing course in how we address this problem to ensure we’re in the best position to pursue a $20 billion opportunity as scoped in the IBM news release. In fact, Business Insider’s headline for the story was “IBM Plants Stake in a $20 Billion Market With Its Latest Buy.”

At this point, you might be thinking, how will Coupa compete against IBM in the e-procurement arena?

That’s the beauty of the Emptoris acquisition. It’s synergistic with Coupa. We’ve had a relationship with Emptoris for some time (highlighted in the Gartner report on e-procurement) and have teamed with the company on a number of deals. The combination of Emptoris (analytics for procurement) + Coupa (engine for procurement) + IBM services makes for a compelling value proposition.

That’s why we’re feeling the joy as begets the holiday season.

Coupa recently announced the launch of our Spend Optimizer Tool.  Our philosophy behind our offering is to provide line of business owners information when they need it (accessible), information that is clean (accurate), and information that can be utilized to make real business decisions (actionable).  By leveraging Coupa’s vision on spend management and our best in class data model, we are able to provide our line of business users with insightful information from our Spend Optimizer tool.  Along with Coupa’s own data, we have the capability to bring in data from external systems to ‘mashup’ with Coupa’s data to allow organizations to quickly gain insight into data that they never had before!

Gartner recently included Coupa in their “E-Procurement Vendor and Market Landscape” report. Spend Matters UK published a quick write-up on the report this morning.

If you haven’t had a chance to look through the findings, I encourage you to download the report and take some time to see what Gartner is saying about your eProcurement vendor.