Co(u)pacabana's Latest Number Opens Just in Time for the Summer Crowds
Coupa, a low-cost, On-Demand e-procurement provider is continuing to prove that how much a company spends on eProcurement is not necessarily tied to how user friendly or powerful the system actually is. In my view, this is especially good news for small and middle market companies who don't have the budgets to implement an ERP SRM solution -- or one from a more expensive best of breed provider. Coupa's latest release offers a number of enhancements, many of which Michael Lamoureux has already encyclopedically blogged about on Sourcing Innovation. I'll spare you the deep details on this post, but Coupa's most important enhancements in this latest release are focused on driving usability and adoption. Most important in my view, Coupa has invested in enhancing supplier enablement and connectivity through offering self-service capabilities designed to speed up the initial on-boarding and supplier management processes. In addition, the latest version also offers enhanced workflow for users and managers, additional UI enhancements and strong administrative capabilities for procurement and finance professionals.
All in all, the latest release appears to be a big step forward for the e-procurement upstart. But Coupa isn't just copying existing enterprise software paradigms in the latest release -- they're also leapfrogging others in some areas, incorporating newer paradigms and approaches to navigation and catalog/item search. For example, they've incorporated the concept of a tag cloud to help users find what they're looking for (see the picture below if you're curious about how this works). I asked Dave Stephens, Coupa's CEO and co-founder, why he chose to go down this path. Dave suggested to me that "progressive procurement organizations of all sizes aren't threatened by empowering employees in their e-procurement initiative. Rather, they actively recruit frontline employees in the pursuit to drive compliance and savings by bringing additional spend under management. Using Web 2.0 technologies such as tag clouds for better spend classification, these organizations enhance user adoption while simultaneously gaining far better insight on their spending."
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You're missing the point. They don't care about the large corporations - which make up less than 10% of the corporate world. They care about the little guy ... the 60% to 70% of businesses that could benefit from enterprise procurement software but can't afford the six-figure to seven-figure plus solutions charged by companies like Ariba and their main competitors.
These guys don't have that much in the way of complex spend. And anything that could be complex, because of the relatively small volume that they consume, they simplify. Most still use paper invoices.
In other words, while Ariba wants the champagne drinkers and mid-tier players like Ketera are trying to scale down into the white wine spritzer market, where 1M is too much but 100K might be doable, they want your back room bud drinkers who struggle with making 10K investments but really need something to make sure their purchasers don't do something really, really stupid after one bud too many.
That's where Coupa is today, but look how salesforce got started. In many companies, they've replaced $10 million+ Siebel implementations. An interesting comparison? We'll see. But Coupa will have to go broad eventually. Still, I like the direction at this stage especially after the Bud that I just had.
- Joe "six pack" Busch
Sure you get better control, but at what cost?
But I don't expect any of you evangelists to agree with me. And I never said they weren't worth the cost, just that I'm not convinced yet.