Earlier this month I attended Coupa’s user conference, Coupa INSPIRE, in San Francisco. This second annual conference built upon the success of last year’s event and provided great insight into the company, its solutions, and its focus. What follows is a summary and analysis of the event’s main highlights.

New Language of Customer Success

Coupa has long-enjoyed playing the role of industry upstart, a disruptive force against the old ways of doing things and Coupa CEO, Rob Bernshteyn cleverly linked his company’s approach to the market to the approach taken by Coupa’s customers – to not settle for business as usual and challenge the norms and status quo – in his Day One Keynote Address. Rob kicked off the event with a rousing presentation called the “New Language of [Customer] Success” wherein Rob championed the role of procurement and described the inevitability of its transformation. Rob argued that those who have been in procurement for a long time predicted its rise. “We knew that there was something really special here [in procurement] and we knew we were sitting on a goldmine.” The gold in this case was the opportunity to add financial value, impact profitability, and decrease operating expenses while increasing shareholder and enterprise value. Rob said that those in back office knew that they would have the opportunity to move to the front of the house and become the new corporate unsung heroes, managing billions in spend and transforming the role of procurement from one of support into one of true business leadership.

For Rob, achieving this “shared vision,” however, requires (1) a strategy (that Rob believes begins with breaking down organizational barriers and getting procurement directly involved at the transaction level) (2) an ability to execute, and above all (3) a trusting partnership, one that Rob believes Coupa has successfully established with its customers. “What we’re doing is difficult,” said Rob, “but, we’re doing it together.”

CIO Perspectives on “The Cloud”

After Rob’s Keynote, the day took an interesting turn towards IT with a panel discussion of five CIOs (from Juniper Networks, Silicon Valley Bank, Salesforce.com, Amerinet, and Land O’Lakes). The panel covered some expected territory – the broad rise of cloud technology and what it means for IT departments – and some less so – the future of the CIO role and how procurement should approach the CIO today .

Most of the CIOs on the panel have adopted a “why not cloud” as the default enterprise technology strategy and as a result of more cloud solutions in use, have found that the role of their departments has shifted from one less focused on tactical areas like system up-time and implementation schedules to one more focused on analytics and technology’s linkage to business value.

When it comes to approaching the CIO for new enterprise technology, Salesforce.com’s tech lead said “Since we’re viewed as a cost center, anytime there is a project that impacts the bottom line that we can support, you get our attention.”  While the Juniper CIO reminded the audience that sometimes procurement’s best path to CIO collaboration is made by helping the CIO source and save money so that the IT department can meet its budget.

The CIOs were fairly uniform in their opinions on the topics covered (including the trust and value they see in their Coupa relatonships) but several offered an interesting take on the keys to new software deployments – including “unless you break the scar tissue, you won’t get there” (Salesforce.com); the importance of leveraging the best practices of your solution providers and not getting caught up in getting the new system to look like the old one (Juniper Networks); and the importance of “not trying to design what you have or used to do” (Land O’Lakes).

New Product Enhancements and Partnerships

Coupa used its INSPIRE conference to announce several new partnerships and many new enhancements to its product suite. It also introduced a new product to its Coupa 11 release, Coupa Inventory, that is designed to help companies better manage their inventory by gaining better visibility into their stockrooms and warehouses. Coupa also announced a broad series of enhancements to its solution suite including, expanded capabilities for suppliers to manages PO change orders, new invoice dispute resolution features, broader sourcing capabilities,and direct integration to Orbitz. On the partnership front, Coupa announced that DocuSign’s Digital Transaction Management (DTM) platform will integrate to the Coupa Contracts solution to enable digital execution of contracts. Coupa also announced partnerships with Alibaba.com (that plans to link Coupa’s customers to the international marketplace) and with Keboola, a services company who will help Coupa customers better manage third-party system data. Finally, Coupa announced that it has “has achieved SAP certification as powered by the SAP NetWeaver® technology platform.”

Several weeks before its INSPIRE conference, Coupa announced that it had raised $40 million in a new round of funding. Since its founding in 2006, Coupa has historically been successful in using its funding to develop innovative and usable solutions; this has been borne out by the high revenue and customer usage growth  rates that it consistently reports. On the heels of INSPIRE, we expect Coupa to maintain its momentum in its current markets for both this year and next and we expect a new corporate strategy will begin to emerge as the plans for Coupa’s second decade takes shape.

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