Back in late ‘06 / early ‘07, Coupa was one of the first enterprise software companies to embrace cloud computing – before the term had even taken hold.  Since then, and especially now, a lot of people ask why we did it, how we’re doing it and how we like it.  While we like it, our customers seem to love it…so that answers the third question.  The others are a little trickier, because no two companies are alike in their infrastructure requirements, computing requirements, customer requirements, architecture, etc.  But I’m pretty sure of one thing: if you want to play in the cloud with your customers, you should embrace the cloud for yourself.  It’s much more than just saying that we use our own application and it’s offered software-as-a-service (SaaS).  That gives you just a small slice of cloud life.  For Coupa, we run our whole business in the cloud, and we’ve learned just as much from being a customer and user of cloud applications, as we have from being a vendor of one ourselves.  In fact, I’d argue that we’ve learned even more from being a customer.

So why did we move to the cloud?  I’d love to say that we had the foresight to embrace cloud computing as the smart choice from a wide range of strategic options for how to grow the compnay; and in a way, we did.  We quickly recognized the Salesforce.com model as superior for customer satisfaction, and on some levels, modeled our business around some of the best practices that Salesforce.com pioneered.  But the other consideration that drove us ot the cloud was a lot more basic – the old greenback!  At that time, Coupa did not have a lot of capital to buy servers and run them at top-flight data centers (or run our own data center LOL!).  Since its inception in 2006, Coupa has purchased just two servers, and we disassembled the second one and put its CPU in the first.  The working server and the other chassis have since been decommissioned and sit in our office like the USS Intrepid docked in the Hudson on Pier 86 in New York City.  A little piece of nostalgia.

From our founding, we believed in both efficiency and frugality.  And so, from Day 1, we have run our business almost exclusively on cloud/SaaS/On-Demand applications.  And now, three years later, we’ve learned from the best, saw some gotchas, co-opted certain strategies and embraced the cloud.  As I look through each division of the company, we’re all zealots and hardly use anything “local”.  Sure, we have desks, monitors and laptops as our non-employee “assets”, plus a smidgen of “local” software.  That pinch includes a few copies of Microsoft Office (most use Google Docs for better sharing), Omnigraffle, Photoshop and Quickbooks.   And unfortunately, Quickbooks Online was not up to snuff for our needs, but I’ll move over as soon as it is Mac-ready, online bill pay-enabled, etc.

The inventory of Coupa cloud services only starts with our own employees using Coupa eProcurement for requisitioning, approvals, purchase orders, invoices, asset tracking and expense management.  From there, pretty much every other system is in the cloud, including:
-  Marketing automation (a small plug for Pardot)
-  Customer relationship management (Salesforce.com of course.  And one of Coupa’s newest customers!)
-  Email, Calendaring, IM
-  File sharing
-  Wiki
-  Source control
-  Various monitoring systems
-  Customer help desk (a customer favorite that we manage through Zendesk)
-  Code monitoring
-  Performance control
-  Bug tracking
-  PBX
-  Payroll

Since some of these functions involve multiple applications, I’d comfortably say that we take advantage of close to 100 external services today.  You can’t help but learn from each one you use, and that has certainly contributed to our success as a cloud computing company.  I’ve got plenty of stories, but the biggest lesson I’ve learned from these services is that easy enablement and clear communication are critical to customer success.  And while I’m confident in our collective experience and the service we provide, we continue to learn from the services we use as customers, and apply what we learn to provide better and better service to our Coupa customers.