Coupa Announces Contractually Acquisition

Last week, Coupa, the California-based provider of spend management solutions for the cloud, provided Ardent Partners with a briefing on its recent acquisition of Contractually, the Vancouver, Canada-based provider of contract authoring and processing solutions. According to company officials, Coupa’s decision to acquire Contractually was based largely on customer demand for contract authoring and reviewing capabilities. Coupa has some contract management capability within its solutions, like its repository, alerting, and reporting, but those features are purely post-signature. Coupa looked for ways to augment its solutions with pre-signature capabilities, like contract authoring, redlining, automated workflows, and straight-through processing, that offer collaborative features akin to Google Docs or Microsoft 365 solutions.

Coupa considered Contractually and determined that not only were they “a good fit” for Coupa’s culture, but that they had developed their solutions on the same Ruby-on-Rails architecture as Coupa. As a result, Coupa told us that they will maintain its in-house contract management features, but add Contractually’s pre-signature features to provide users, particularly legal staff, with a contract lifecycle management solution that fosters collaboration among internal staff and suppliers, including real-time redlining and instant notification features.

Basware Announces Two Updates to Business Network, 2015 Financial Results

In mid January, Basware, the Finland-based provider of e-invoicing and purchase-to-pay solutions, announced that it has added two new features to its Basware Business Network – Business Directory and Vendor Manager. Business Directory allows Basware network users to search for trading partners, whether they are suppliers or buyers, and add them to their contact list. And in 2Q2016, users will be able to upload custom lists and let the network automatically match them. For its part, Vendor Manager allows larger organizations to empower their vendors to make changes or additions to their own data (i.e., self-service), which, according to Basware, ought to increase efficiencies among AP and procurement teams and help to ensure that payment information and personal contacts are up-to-date.

And on February 2, Basware released financial results for 2015, stating that it had achieved its “full year sales and operating profit targets.” Highlights of its announcement include:

• Net sales of 143,420,000 Euros – a year-over-year growth of 12.3%
• Operating profit of 4,676,000 Euros – 3.3% of net sales
• Recurring revenue of 67.8%

Lavante Introduces Supplier Information Management Solution for the Mid-Market

In late January, Lavante, Inc., a cloud-based supplier management solution provider, announced that it has introduced a version of its supplier information management (SIM) solution suite for companies recognizing between $200 million and $2 billion in revenues, or what Lavante considers the “mid market.” This version of Lavante SIM features many functions of the original suite, including: supplier onboarding, supplier management, contract management, certification validation, bank information validation. and tax information management capabilities. And as Lavante notes, its solution is SOC 1 Type 2 & SOC 2 Type 2 compliant.

SAP Ariba Partners with First Data, Expands AribaPay

Also in late January, Fierce Finance IT reported that SAP Ariba,  the online business network wholly owned by SAP, has partnered with First Data to expand online invoicing and payment processing via AribaPay to Europe and Latin America. The expansion will reportedly add payment transfer and settlement capabilities to invoice management already offered on the Ariba network. Originally deployed in the U.S. in the summer of 2014, AribaPay users receive IDs from Discover as a proxy for sensitive account information. European and Latin American users will reportedly use a similar arrangement when the service becomes available to them later in 2016.

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