January 18, 2012: Coupa’s Stellar 2011 Growth is Proof that P2P Fresh Thinking is Thriving

There are lots of technology providers serving as great proxies for general market growth. For a while, we used to consider Ariba the bellwether vendor in the P2P sector, but now we tend to see the ERPs and their solution partners as more generally indicative of adoption and general trends, owing to the growth and adoption of SAP SRM, among other tools.

January 17, 2012: Competitors Converge Around Ariba

Ariba (ARBA) continues to come under fire. In my first piece, entitled “Ariba’s Competitive Threats Are Intensifying,” I discussed many growing issues the Spend Management software leader is facing.

January 17, 2012: Super Coupa! Annual results impress for e-Procurement provider

We’ve featured Coupa before of course, not just because we can’t resist the inevitable puns that go with their name! Their innovative, easy to adopt / use purchase to pay and now spend analytics software (released recently as we reported here), has been making serious waves for the last couple of years in the US and now increasingly in Europe.

November 17, 2011: A P2P Vendor Crosses the Analytics Line: Coupa Ventures Into Spend Analysis (Part 2)

When users log-on to Coupa’s Spend Optimizer solution, they are greeted with a welcome screen that allows them to quickly navigate to different reports and activity-specific dashboards. What immediately stands out about Coupa Spend Optimizer is how the solution is tightly integrated with Coupa’s P2P capability.

November 17, 2011: New Product News

Coupa Software announced the launch of Coupa Spend Optimizer, its spend analytics solution. Coupa Spend Optimizer features information access throughout the enterprise, self-generated graphical dashboards and reports, and alerts and suggestions for spending, all built on a foundation of Coupa’s e-procurement data model.

November 16, 2011: A P2P Vendor Crosses the Analytics Line: Coupa Ventures Into Spend Analysis (Part 1)

Earlier this week, Coupa announced it was entering the spend analytics market with its Spend Optimizer product. Coupa is positioning the solution as delivering “intelligence for everyone” from procurement to finance to line of business managers.

November 10, 2011: 5 Companies that Stand Out

Five companies with standout information management implementations have been chosen by a group of information experts. This award was created to recognize solutions that are groundbreaking and provide quantifiable business value. Innovation is partly about adapting to changing environments, and these solutions demonstrated the ability to respond to dynamic business goals or introduce a new approach or idea to a company or an industry.

August 23, 2011: The Big Data revolution: 5 startups mining the trend

The thing about all this data is useless unless it is mined and interpreted with the right tools. Memeburn takes a look at five Silicon Valley startups and how they’re looking to use Big Data.

August 21, 2011: Ariba’s Competitive Threats Are Intensifying

With the plethora of companies trading on the stock market, it can be easy to forget that privately-held companies need to be monitored, as well. My company recently did a check into the competitive landscape for Ariba. It may come as a surprise that our checks revealed that an up-and-comer named Coupa is nearing the scale required to put a dent in ARBA’s lucrative procure-to-pay business.

August 17, 2011: The Best Back Office Software for Running Your Business

They’re not the only players in the numbers game, however. For estimating taxes, try Outright. Mint is free and as such, very popular with businesses on a tight budget. Expensify is great at—you guessed it—expense tracking, as is Coupa.

August 15, 2011: 4 Traits of Better Business Software

Your company just on-boarded another software product that promises to make work better, faster and easier. If you’re familiar with traditional enterprise software, you probably found yourself rolling your eyes already. But some newer players are giving the dinosaurs a run for their money by focusing on simplification and usability. Not all business software is created equal, and there are some principles to keep in mind to identify truly better business software.

So, how do you spot better business software?

July 21, 2011: SUBWAY Heads Down the Cloud Computing Highway

As the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and public cloud services industries mature they are being deployed to play more pivotal roles in the day-to-day operations of bigger and bigger organizations. The latest example is Coupa Software’s recent contract with the Independent Purchasing Cooperative (IPC) of SUBWAY, the largest franchise company in the world.

July 20, 2011: Subway orders up SaaS for spending management

Subway has 35,000 restaurants across the globe and the data center capacity to internalize most technology needs, but the sandwich chain recently signed up for a spending management system hosted on Amazon.com’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) cloud platform. The company chose software-as-a-service rather than an in-house deployment largely because the hosted model was so user-friendly, reports Patrick Thibodeau at Computerworld.

July 20, 2011: Subway changes its menu, adds SaaS

Subway IT decided that software usability was the selling point for a SaaS-based system: Subway is a fast-food franchise operation with some 35,000 restaurants worldwide. Like many big enterprises, it expected to host a new mission-critical spending-management system in-house. It ended up doing the exact opposite.

July 14, 2011: How To Get Employees To (Really) Use New Technology

Your IT team has spent months researching, selecting and launching a shiny, new technology – such as an enterprise cloud application – and you’ve been told it will revolutionize the way your company does business. The rub is, how can you be certain your employees will a) adopt it, and b) really gravitate to the tool and want to use it, versus resorting to traditional, alternative methods they already know well?

July 12, 2011: How the cloud could transform business procurement

If you were looking to procure, say, the services of an unscrupulous private detective to hack into the mobile phone messages of politicians, celebrities, grieving relatives of war dead, child crime victims and casualties of terrorist atrocities. it’s highly unlikely you would use a procurement system. . . . But might they have changed their minds if they had heard about the benefits of adopting a cloud-based procurement system, or even a hybrid of on-premise and cloud?

June 16, 2011: Cloud Computing Should Lead to More Software Usage

While most of the conversation surrounding cloud computing tends to focus on cost savings, the most important thing about cloud computing at the end of the day may prove to be more accessibility to applications. One of the disappointing things about enterprise software in general is its usability. Whether it is packaged software or custom developed, most end users don’t tend to rave about the user interface of the software at work. But in an era where more companies rely on software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, Coupa CEO Rob Bernshteyn says that’s about to change.

May 26, 2011: New Coupa Release — Updated UI, Features, Same Opinionated Spend Management Attitude (Part 2)

Coupa has opted to not only focus its recent release efforts on enhancing its UI and adding a number of new features (see screen shots throughout this post highlighting the updated user experience), but also on how it rolls out the solution to customers as well broader integration requirements based on different customer systems environments. Typical deployment periods are measured in weeks, not quarters (and very basic deployments can be handled in days).

May 26, 2011: Five Simple Ways to Reduce Spend Volume

Following these practices, including the use of its technology, Coupa customers report spend reductions of 0.83% to 4.3%. Looking at industry segments, Coupa calculates that the retail industry overall, which had profits of $54.6 billion in 2010 overspent on procurement by $3.73 billion. The financial services industry, with $170 billion in profits, overspent by $3.48 billion. The point: there are significant savings to be gained by tightening up your spending practices.

May 24, 2011: New Coupa Release — Updated UI, Features, Same Opinionated Spend Management Attitude (Part 1)

Coupa is not just a P2P or Spend Management tool when it’s used in this way — rather, it’s a single interface to drive all buying in an organized, highly- or semi-controlled manner depending on the system configuration and the categories of spend it supports.

February 15, 2011: Coupa Raises $12M to Help Companies Spend Smarter

Coupa, the developer of a cloud spend management (CSM) platform, has raised $12 million in Series D funding led by Mohr Davidow Ventures with
El Dorado Ventures, BlueRun Ventures and Battery Ventures participating. This brings Coupa’s total funding to $27 million.

December 17, 2010: Taking the Amazon.com Approach

Coupa is winning business from companies like Rent-a-Center that are looking for streamlined purchasing solutions that work a little more like consumer e-commerce websites and a little less like enterprise software. “We want to make it so intuitive that even if the alternative of going across the street to Home Depot is there, you’d never take it,” Bernshteyn says.

October 12, 2010: Retailers Sold on IT – Making Staples Easy

“In the past, our store staff spent too much time trying to navigate the ordering system in back offices,” Warrick says. “This [solution] gives them the tools to make better decisions about inventory with more efficiency. We need our store employees out on the floor, not in the back room.”

October 1, 2010: Ordering Made Easy

“Having our employees see pictures of the products they’re ordering, along with the cost, has prompted them to be better stewards,” Jones said. “In fact, we’ve seen a 3% decrease in supply spend because of it.”

September 9, 2010: Cloud-based procurement pays dividends for The Container Store

Multichannel retailer The Container Store Inc. is processing 50% fewer purchase orders for indirect goods each week since implementing an Internet-based procurement and expense management system from Coupa Software Inc.

July/August 2010: 40 Vendors We’re Watching in 2010

Old problem, new approach. You’re a medium to a large company but don’t know details of your top suppliers or what’s spent with them. There is a market for procure-to-pay visibility your own IT department is probably years away from building itself.

July 29, 2010: This Week in Cloud Computing

Coupa CEO Rob Bernshteyn chats with the This Week team about the future of procurement and cloud computing.

July 14, 2010: The Cure for Enterprise Software Fatigue

The fact remains that true SaaS-based dashboard solutions that provide real-time, real-world intelligence at the point of purchase is the long overdue response to the tired ERP-centric platforms offered through “Ariba, SAP or Oracle” . . . Vinimaya or jCatalog solutions notwithstanding.

July 6, 2010: SaaS Provider Shares Integration Victories, Challenges

It’s really a way to extend the value of that ERP system and there are certainly some complexities there, but when we’re talking in particular around these four customers that we mentioned in the press release, you know, Ravi’s team is measuring their implementation in this integration project in terms of hours. I think that’s a big difference from what most of these large enterprises have come to expect for any integration project, regardless of provider to their ERP systems.

July 5, 2010: Happy New (Fiscal) Year! A quick review of COUPA

We went live with it in June but now it’s very real. The paper slips can be burned, it’s all digital now! I don’t normally get excited about procurement, but this tool makes it cool, almost even fun. It’s very Amazon-like. I’m looking forward to seeing the details of how I allocate my funds as well as the macro level spending of our organization. If you have an opportunity to explore Coupa I highly recommend it.

June 21, 2010: Deal Radar 2010: Coupa

Coupa is an e-procurement and spending management provider with a mission to build “procurement for the masses” through its SaaS solution. It says that existing solutions were developed to support a model characterized by scarcity of information, mandates from management, and a centralized bureaucracy that placed buyers in each business unit to purchase on behalf of others; market dynamics that foster the free flow of information and a self-service mentality have rendered existing models obsolete.

June 18, 2010: Five questions with Coupa Software CEO Rob Bernshteyn

The promise of Coupa is that it is an extension of existing enterprise planning systems. In a nutshell, Coupa tries to make procurement easier for employees of all stripes within an enterprise.

June 15, 2010: Snakes in a playpen and why the current Coupa and recent SAP press releases tell a different story of the same shifting paradigm

…one of the more telling remarks came from Coupa’s Jason Hekl when he said, “we don’t even need to contact SAP, let alone engage them in any meaningful way to implement our solution.” They are “not necessary to the implementation process.”

June 11, 2010: Making Cents in the Cloud

A closer look at the spending problem reveals several new solutions made possible by the rapid pace of innovation by cloud computing application providers; and how those solutions make smarter spending an achievable goal for businesses.

Big Fat Finance Blog

May 6, 2010: Managing Spending and Procurement as One

In most organizations, spending and procurement are different disciplines managed by different people. In the end, however, they are about the same thing — spending the organization’s money. So it was only a matter of time before someone would combine the two. That’s what Coupa Software, a cloud-based SaaS spend management player, did. Read more >>>

April 8, 2010: Software’s future breaks through the “clouds”

David Howard, director of central purchasing for Reebok-Canada (Montreal), and a Coupa user, provides a user’s point of view. He likes the ease of use. “The screen looks like a web page and you only see what’s in your cue, which adds focus,” he says. “Because the cloud-hosted software is subscription-based”, he says, “it doesn’t take a lot of his internal resources.”

March 23, 2010: Coupa Heads for the Clouds — eProcurement, T&E and Beyond (Part 3)

All in all, Coupa’s T&E makes a strong case for integrating T&E capabilities into a broader set of eProcurement tools. The real power of the integration, however, comes from an integrated budgeting and forecasting capability that, like ExpenseWatch, shows forecasting and actual numbers for both areas in an intuitive manner.

March 18, 2010: Coupa Heads for the Clouds — eProcurement, T&E and Beyond (Part 2)

As I demoed Coupa’s latest release, what became clear is that they had thought through the key process flows from a T&E perspective and all of their key linkages into the procurement process. From a T&E user experience perspective, Coupa provides a highly intuitive experience that I felt was designed to be as painless as possible..

March 10, 2010: Coupa Heads for the Clouds — eProcurement, T&E and Beyond (Part 1)

…where Coupa really excels with its latest release is not just in the functional addition of T&E reporting, a module that may prove sufficient for many companies but lacks some of the functional richness of Concur, Rearden and others. Rather, Coupa excels in the overall user, administrator and management experience. At all levels, Coupa has really thought through the essential information a user needs to consume with a minimum amount of navigational fuss.

February 1, 2010: Improving the Bottom Line Through E-Procurement

“In challenging economic times, companies can boost profitability by unifying procurement activities and adopting strict metrics for purchasing”, says Rob Bernshteyn, CEO of Coupa Software, Inc.

February, 2010: Coupa is One of Dream Simplicity’s Top 25

Coupa has been ranked as the #2 on-demand solution on Dream Simplicity’s Top 25 list.

January 19, 2010: Coupa Comes Through With a Decent 2009 — A Good Thing for the Market

Bottom line: if you’re a company with <$3 billion in annual revenue and you’re willing to work with a smaller provider, you owe it to yourself to put Coupa on a longer eProcurement shortlist. (If you’re <$1 billion in revenue, don’t even stop to think about it — check out Coupa as early as possible in your vendor analysis.)

November 9, 2009: e-Procurement Delivered On Demand as a Service

The recession has taught us a number of important lessons. Among them, the value of adopting smarter spending practices in any economy. Yet, according to Jason Hekl, Vice President of Marketing for Coupa Software, very few companies have the resources to manage spending effectively. The reason, he says, is that most procurement software is priced beyond the reach of all but the largest companies. He also cites complicated implementation and a lack of truly user-friendly tools as two of the biggest reasons for failed e-procurement initiatives.

October 13, 2009: 10 SaaS Companies To Keep on Your Radar For 2010

1. Coupa is for Spend Management, helping companies big and small get a better idea of what they are spending money on. Coupa has raised $7.5 Million in Series C financing from EL Dorado Ventures and is leading the charge with Coupa Sam a cartoon action hero. This innovative company has over a 100 customers and growing quickly!

September 1, 2009: Coupa Raises $7.5 Million, Helps Companies Spend Smarter

Coupa, a provider of on-demand e-procurement solutions, has secured $7.5 million in Series C funding led by El Dorado Ventures and joined by previous investors El Dorado Ventures, BlueRun Venturesand Battery Ventures. With the new capital injection, the total amount raised by the San Mateo, CA startup gets doubled to a healthy $15 million.

August 19, 2009: Test-driving e-procurement: Offer gives public sector free software for six months

“We saw the problems facing state and municipal governments – the employee pay cuts, the forced time off – and we knew we had a solution to help government save money,” Mr. Hekl said in an interview. “We’re a cloud-based solution, so customers can have great success with minimal cost,” he said.

August 7, 2009: The clouds are gathering for Coupa

In 21st century fashion, Coupa takes the idea of crowdsourcing buying and pulls it into the service through iRequest and iBuy. These allow buyers to step outside central buying agreements when the situation demands but without breaking buying control. It’s a neat idea. Coupa makes a big deal of benchmarking, which is crunched nightly producing a report which signals where the customer is performing relative to the market as a whole. It’s a bit of a blunt instrument because Coupa has yet to develop segmented market models. Even so, as a first stab, there are plenty of metrics to consider as a starting point for improving processes. As a bonus, Coupa includes direct out-of-the-box integration to Quick Books and has integration links to SAP, Oracle and NetSuite.

August 7, 2009: Friday Rant: Coupa’s Free Government Giveaway — If Only It Was This Easy

Earlier this week, Coupa, one of my favorite upstart vendors in the sector, embarked on what can only be described as a superficially ingenious marketing giveaway: a six-month free trial to its software for all government agencies and departments. According to the website describing the offer, “The Coupa Software Six Months to Smarter Spending program offers government agencies a FREE six-month subscription to Coupa e-Procurement to rein in spending and establish control over inefficient purchasing practices.” While I applaud Coupa for not only trying to be part of the solution to government spending rather than a problem — not to mention for their creative marketing — I have very little hope of this amounting to any more than a marketing stunt, at least at the Federal level. Which is an absolute bloody shame. And the reason it will fail speaks to why our Federal procurement programs are way too complicated, inefficient and out of touch with taxpayer needs in the first place.

August 6, 2009: Company Challenges Government Agencies to Practice Smarter Spending

With solutions such as the one provided under this initiative, the heavy lifting associated with properly aligning platform capabilities with operational requirements to achieve tangible and sustainable savings is part of the inherent and intuitive characteristics of both the provider and its technology. In essence, SaaS technology adapts to the way the user operates versus traditional applications that force the user to adapt to the technology. This of course is where IT or ERP-centric traditionalists have difficulty in grasping a Coupa-type solution and approach. The belief that it’s just too easy, so it can’t be effective seems to be a stumbling block.

February 27, 2009: QuickDraw Procurement with Coupa QuickStart

Noticing that one of the biggest barriers to adoption of e-Procurement software in small and smaller mid-size organizations was the lack of (technical) personnel to support the acquisition, setup, and implementation of en e-Procurement system, Coupa wanted to build an on-demand e-Procurement system that any buyer, with limited technical capability, and only a browser at his or her disposal, could set-up by themselves quickly and easily. The Quickstart wizard, built on top of a basic, default configuration and e-Procurement process, enables a buyer to get going as soon as they define basic company information and configure the system on an as-needed basis. As a result, most users will be able to be up, running, and cutting their first purchase order in under an hour.

February 23, 2009: People on the Move

Coupa Software Inc.’s new CEO, Rob Bernshteyn, launched his first business at the age of 13.
His first foray into the business world — selling sports-card memorabilia — was so successful it financed his college education.

February 12, 2009: eProcurement for the Masses — Coupa Brings in New CEO

I had the chance to catch up and trade thoughts with Rob yesterday and found him anxious to share ideas he thought would resonate in trying to sell eProcurement into small and middle market companies in today’s environment. Some of the concepts he shared, such as “real spend control” might resonate well with companies looking to not just reduce maverick buying but to reduce expenditures in the current environment. Period.

April 9, 2008: Coupa Raises $6M To Control Business Spending

“There are some big players in [the procurement] field, but that’s exactly what creates an opening for Coupa. Companies like Ariba only serve large customers, because installing their systems is expensive and difficult. Coupa, on the other hand, is much cheaper and easier to set-up.”

December 12, 2007: Coupa Pours e-Procurement Solution for Smaller Businesses

“E-procurement software used to be so big and expensive that only Fortune 500 companies could justify the costs — and the savings. But now a veteran enterprise software developer has brought a web-based procurement solution to small and midsize businesses”

November 13, 2007: How to Save Money on Legal Fees, Meetings, and Everything Else You Buy

“Every CEO/CFO needs to watch expenses like a hawk. Do you have standard rules for buying everything you need, and handling the paperwork efficiently? If not, you could be wasting money. Many Fortune 500 firms have automated their purchasing with e-procurement systems. And now a SaaS solution for small and medium-sized companies has arrived on the market.”

November 11, 2007: E-procurement : Coupa s’attaque aux PME nord-américaines

“L’entrée de gamme e-procurement donne accès à l’application « on demand » pour 2 500 dollars par an pour dix utilisateurs avec des fonctions simples de gestion et d’approbation des commandes. La tranche la plus élevée du tarif monte à 35 500 dollars pour 1 000 utilisateurs – version complète de l’application.”

October 26, 2007: On Demand e-Procurement System Launches for Small and Midsize Companies

“e-Procurement pioneer Coupa has debuted an on demand solution aimed at providing small and midsize organizations access to affordable e-procurement applications with advanced capabilities previously only available to the Fortune 500.”

October 23, 2007: SAP SRM, Another Brick from the Wall

“The contrast could not be more stark between yesterday’s launch of Coupa’s Amazon-hosted SaaS e-procurement system and SAP’s decision on Friday to cancel the upcoming release of its spend management product.”

October 22, 2007: Coupa Shakes Up Market: On Demand Procure-to-Pay for All

“Earlier today, Coupa announced their foray into the On Demand eProcurement space, offering up what appears to be an unbeatable combination of price and ease of use for small and middle market companies and possibly even larger organizations as well who don’t have the patience to wait until 2009 when SAP’s next SRM version becomes generally available. Just as Salesforce.com shook up the CRM market by offering low prices for companies of all sizes, Coupa is doing the same for the eProcurement space.”

October 22, 2007: Coupa Launches On Demand e-Procurement System

“Coupa On Demand automates the entire purchasing process from requisition, approval, and purchase order creation to RFQs (request for quotation), quotations, receiving, inventory and invoicing. Use of the application, the company says, helps streamline the procurement process.”

October 22, 2007: Amazon Helps Vendor Launch Software-as-a-Service e-Procurement

“The system makes it easier to keep track of purchases and generate reports about the products Cequent buys, which range from lab gloves to chemicals,” says Susie Troung, director of administration and finance for Cequent.

October 19, 2007: Coupa Launches SaaS e-Procurement Running on Amazon’s EC2 Service

“Coupa aims to automate purchasing processes and all of the requisitions, approvals, purchase orders, quotes, receiving, inventory checks and inventory that goes with them.”

August 29, 2007: Coupa Updates Open Source e-Procurement Project

“First freely downloadable e-procurement software solution adds features intended to streamline e-procurement process, increase ease-of-use.”

July 18, 2007: 2007 Supply & Demand Chain Executive 100

“Top tips for enabling your 21st century supply chain from today’s leading supply chain solutions providers.”

June 1, 2007: Coupa Software Releases E-Procurement Solution

“Coupa’s community experience—in which employees can add classification tags or provide reviews of products—improves the system as it is used, while also providing constant feedback to purchasing management.”

May 15, 2007: Open Source Arrives in Procurement

“Two Oracle veterans who formed their own company last year have released what they call the first and only freely downloadable e-procurement solution.”

April 15, 2007: Open Source Arrives in Procurement

“Manufacturers that are open to the open source software movement have another new option following the launch earlier this year of Coupa Software and its Coupa eProcurement Express open source e-procurement software product.”

April 11, 2007: 10 Enterprise Software Companies to Watch

“From business intelligence to CRM, from scheduling and e-procurement to database management and data governance, there is no shortage of enterprise applications available to help businesses make their processes more efficient. Choosing can be difficult, however: Do you go open source? Software-as-a-service, or in-house deployment? Every vendor has a sales pitch. Here are 10 worth watching.”

April 9, 2007: Freely Downloadable e-Procurement Solution Launches

“How much should a sophisticated e-procurement solution cost? Not a dime, according to Coupa Software, which recently released what it is calling the industry’s first and only freely downloadable e-procurement solution.”

March 26, 2007: Coupa: Can e-procurement apps tackle the midmarket?

“Can two Oracle alumni hit bring e-procurement applications to the midmarket? Coupa, a Foster City, Calif., startup sure hopes so.”

March 21, 2007: Coupa Brings Amazon.com Look To E-Procurement

“Startup Coupa plans to launch next month a beefier commercial version of its open-source e-procurement software, which tries to carry over to corporate purchasing the consumer buying experience found on retail Web sites. Ease of use is the mantra of the company that that has offered a free version of its software since early August.”

March 20, 2007: Firm Targets Mid-Market Buying

“For many medium-size and smaller companies, purchasing anything from toner cartridges to ergonomic desks is fraught with paper order forms, memos, fat catalogs and long wait times. Now, a Foster City software startup is hoping to streamline that process, jumping into the newly competitive midmarket sector.”

February 15, 2007: Coupa CEO named 2007 Pro to Know

“Dave Stephens, CEO of e-procurement solution developer Coupa (and former head of Oracle’s Procurement Applications division), promotes the power of effective procurement.”