Unleashing the Power of the BSM Ecosystem

How companies spend money and who they spend it with matters more than ever. Enterprises face increasingly complex and evolving requirements, spanning diversity and inclusion, ESG, global supply chains, regulatory changes, remote workforces, emerging risks, and much more. As these requirements grow in complexity and vary by industry, region, and other company-specific factors, the need for flexible solutions is growing.

According to a recent McKinsey report on innovation, the ability to identify and quickly address new opportunity areas is critical for enterprises succeeding in the post-pandemic environment. The report highlights a key insight — prioritizing adaptability and innovation is key to unlocking post-crisis growth.

BSM has matured as a category of critical enterprise software

Companies have emerged from the pandemic with a newfound appreciation for managing spend effectively and comprehensively. Business Spend Management (BSM) as a category has matured, and Coupa has evolved to become a single source of truth for managing spend and a foundational component of many enterprise tech stacks.

The Coupa BSM platform combines comprehensive functionality and open architecture to deliver a framework of powerful, out-of-the-box applications used at most every step in the spending chain. Complementing this breadth, the Coupa platform is extensible, allowing customers to easily integrate Coupa with other applications for solutions tailored to a company’s unique needs.

Challenges with the traditional approach to platform extension

Many companies have been extending their BSM platforms by building bespoke applications and integrations, instead of taking advantage of out-of-the-box solutions. This results in applications that are often:

• Stagnant: Companies struggle to keep up with rapidly evolving spend requirements and are unable to keep up with changing needs due to one-off development work.
• Siloed: Systems are not properly integrated with the core platform in which transactions occur and lack a single source of truth, resulting in costly duplication of workflows.
• Inefficient: Enterprises are spending resources on one-off app and integration development and maintenance, with complex processes created as workarounds.

The bottom line — building custom apps in-house is often cost- and time-prohibitive, and rarely generates the highest-quality results.

Open platforms and ecosystems enable efficient adaptability

Coupa has seen time and again that customers are best served by partner ecosystems. In other established categories, such as CRM, open ecosystems have unlocked significant value — the success of Salesforce’s AppExchange and Apple’s App Store are just two of many headline examples. With the largest customer and partner communities in BSM, Coupa is the natural steward of such an ecosystem for this category.

This approach has clearly resonated with partners, who are gravitating toward delivering applications on the Coupa platform through the CoupaLink program. These pre-built solutions extend into categories beyond the spending chain, such as IT management and collaboration. Deeper solutions within BSM are also being developed, including specialized tax engines and supplier risk assessments. All this presents a potent opportunity for companies to adapt more quickly and cost-effectively.

The time is ripe to unleash the power of the BSM ecosystem

Harnessing the power of the ecosystem will help customers make their BSM platforms more:

• Adaptable: Companies can easily integrate new solutions to adapt and meet customer needs quickly and securely. 
• Connected: Open ecosystems enable companies to seamlessly link systems to provide a single source of truth and end-to-end workflows.  
• Efficient: Enterprises will be able to better deploy limited IT resources by leveraging secure applications expertly built for Coupa’s platform.

None of us is as smart as all of us

It’s time to make it even easier for customers to meet new, complex requirements by harnessing the innovation of our partners — as far as we’ve come, we know we can further accelerate the ecosystem’s growth and value. 

We’re hard at work on some major investments in this area, and we’ll be making some big announcements in the months ahead. So stay tuned...