Executing on Our Vision

Today we announced that Coupa has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the Leaders quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Procure-to-Pay Suites for Indirect Procurement 2015*, based on our “ability to execute” and our “completeness of vision."

We’re pleased to be positioned in the leaders quadrant, and also humbled. But, most importantly, we see this as an immense responsibility that we do not take lightly.

Anybody would feel that way. If a colleague tells you that you have a great sense of fashion, you're not going to come to the office in sweatpants the next day. You feel you've just been validated, so you're going to continue what you’ve been doing, only take it up a notch.

That’s how we feel about being in the leaders’ quadrant. We feel proud today, and determined to do even better tomorrow.

Our vision for this marketplace is for all companies to be able to bring 100% of their spend under management, so they have the opportunity optimize every dollar, euro and pound spent for savings they can use to further their own company vision.

Our responsibility is to continue to execute on three guiding principles in order to make our vision a reality.  

The first is to understand the obstacles that companies across every industry share to seeing, and optimizing, all of the spending that's happening in their organization. The idea, in 2015, of only having visibility into ten to forty percent of spend is unacceptable.

We're going to continue to remove obstacles to spend visibility and provide high-integrity data that informs smarter spending decisions at every point of transactional procurement, expenses, and invoicing processes.

We want to get paid fairly for providing what we’re calling Savings as a Service, but we’re not going to do it by monetizing the supplier base. We are committed to giving suppliers multiple options for transacting with buyers in Coupa, with no fees and a minimum of friction.

We are also going to maintain our maniacal focus on reimagining the end user experience from one in which people have to be pushed to transact using friction-filled systems to one where each and every employee would rather use Coupa to responsibly spend the company's money than any other alternative.

And, we will renew our commitment to being the only software vendor in the marketplace with a pre-integrated, organically developed transactional solution that allows customers to realize immediate value, along with the ability to easily switch on new capabilities to uncover new opportunities to optimize spend.

The Coupa Suite brings all of your spending – procurement, expenses and invoicing – together as a whole, for a single version of the truth across the organization. You can see all the purchases that are pre-approved, post-approved and unapproved in one place. You can kick off a reverse auction to source items when you see spend hit a certain level. You can see inventory of all the items you bought in real time. It’s a completely integrated world.

At the same time, we recognize the need to integrate with legacy ERP systems to help companies get more value out of these investments, and we’ve made it so Coupa can be deployed as a strategic extension to any existing system.

Think of it as a Netflix strategy. The latest TVs are shipped with Netflix already integrated. Netflix is a complete viewing experience on its own, but you no longer have to have a separate setup for it. All of that friction has been removed. It’s become a strategic extension to your TV.

All of these efforts will be informed by Coupa’s core values: Ensure customer success, focus on results, and strive for excellence. We want to continue to change the dialog in our industry from one of vendor/customer finger pointing to one that is centered around success. To that end, we will continue to carefully select only the best, brightest, and most passionate people to join us, and our cause.

Our vision will come to fruition when thousands of companies -- large, medium, and small -- are able to instantaneously articulate how they are getting real, measurable financial value by partnering with us. 

We see it as our responsibility to make that happen for each and every customer. This is how we will know we have executed on our vision. We view our dot on the magic quadrant today like a pin on a map. It marks an important place in our journey –one I believe we will look back on as a place where we stopped a moment to admire the view, and then shouldered our packs for the next stage of our ascent.