Coupa Software

Spend Matters 50/50: Coupa – A Provider to Know in 2015

Coupa is a fast-growing company that has become a procure-to-pay leader, competing against those with larger overall business application and ERP footprints including Ariba/SAP and Oracle. At Spend Matters, we have covered Coupa's solution in great detail, reporting on its value proposition and recent news, such as the latest announcement of Coupa acquiring InvoiceSmash, which takes an innovative approach to capturing invoice data via PDF format from smaller suppliers. We can attribute much of Coupa's success to its easy-to-use software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology, which empowers both procurement and regular business users alike. However, Coupa’s motto is not just to get spend under management -- or the offering of a SaaS suite built on a single-data model. Rather, it's the combination of a unified P2P platform that delivers “savings as a service.” The company goes the extra mile not just as a marketing gimmick -- i.e., the clever "SaaS" play on words -- but in truly measuring customer returns and staying true to a suite model that provides an extremely tight coupling of cross-module capabilities. Recently, Coupa CEO Rob Bernshteyn disclosed that Coupa now has over 500 customers, over 400 employees and has integrated a range of business partners into its ecosystem such as Accenture, Deloitte, IBM and KPMG. Based on its recent funding round, Coupa has become one of the few companies valued at more than a billion dollars in the sector, and has taken on this position with a long view to building a sustainable ecosystem, fostering partnerships that can provide it with traction and horsepower far beyond what it can sell and service directly. Coupa’s pricing model is based on a subscription model that depends on the number of modules (functionalities/capabilities) and users. Suppliers do not pay any fees. Coupa is an ideal fit for:

• Medium or large enterprise, with one or several locations, in one or multiple countries looking for an easy-to-use solution that will enable procurement and deliver savings
• Organizations looking to capture multiple spend types – integrating PO, non-PO, T&E and other areas
• Companies seeking to identify P2P solutions that have strong analytics support (not spend analysis -- which is different) to avoid overspending by being in compliance with contracts, budgets and companies’ polices in addition to checking inventory stocks and avoid unjustified reorders
• Procurement and IT teams that value a unified cloud solution (i.e., integrated suite) without supplier fees for connectivity
• Companies looking to leverage  pre-negotiated supplier contracts for rapid savings in basic categories
• Any firm going through a P2P selection process: consider Coupa as a potential provider in your short list