>> Announcer: From the Cosmopolitan hotel
in Las Vegas, Nevada,
it's theCUBE covering Coupa Inspire 2019.
Brought to you by Coupa.
>> Welcome to theCUBE from Coupa Inspire '19!
I am Lisa Martin in the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas
and guess who I have with me?
From the main stage, CEO Rob Bernshteyn.
Rob, welcome to theCUBE!
>> Thank you so much, thank you for having me.
>> Exciting start to day one of inspire.
Really enjoyed the general session this morning.
I learned three things, more than three,
but there's three that really stick out.
One, you like pizza.
>> Two, you like kittens,
and cute pictures of kittens,
and three, since 2016 there has been a 5x increase in the
spend going through the Coupa platform.
Rocket ship!
>> That's right.
Huge momentum. We're well over 1.2 trillion dollars in spend
that's gone through the platform.
It's accelerating and our customers are getting a lot
of value and visualizing that spend,
and routing it to preferred contracts saving money
doing it in smart, compliant ways,
it's a really exciting time for us.
>> It is, and this is across every industry.
Manufacturing, healthcare, retail, etc.
Every industry has the opportunity to leverage this
wealth of data that Coupa has
to be able to get that visibility
and control of all their spend.
That's really revolutionary for any business.
>> Well we're really excited about it.
Our community of customers if very excited about it.
We're building something very special here.
I'll tell you, one of the most exciting things
is when you see that data being used in a way
that drives intelligence
for each individual customer.
You know, we're helping them understand where is there
potential fraud with their expenses,
where are their suppliers maybe sending them duplicate
invoices by accident,
but our AI picks that up.
So we are taking this space to a completely new level,
and it couldn't be more exciting, honestly.
>> We go to a million shows a year,
maybe a little bit less,
and we always here data is oil,
data is gold,
it is if you have access to it,
you can extract insights from it really quickly,
and be able to act on it faster than your competition.
>> Absolutely. You have to be able
to normalize the data first and foremost,
so you need AI capabilities to do that.
You have to access a massive data store.
You have to anonymize the data, obviously.
It needs to be very, very secure,
and then you have to draw insights out of that data,
and one of the things I shared this morning is
that we've given our customers just in 2019
more than 18000 prescriptions
of things they should consider.
For example, putting some suppliers on hold if we think
there's some risk with those suppliers.
So absolutely it's AI
but it's AI as the underlying element that brings out
what we call community intelligence
and that's what's so powerful.
>> And the community as well.
Another really kind of undertone that I felt
and heard this morning from you is this
it's a community of collaboration.
These are other businesses benefiting from
what others have learned, suppliers as well.
So the customer centricity, the supplier centricity
is there.
>> Absolutely. It's all about this community concept.
And we have well over 1000 companies
that we've helped spend smarter effectively.
And they're community
because these customers are sharing both in person,
and online, best practices,
ideas for doing things differently,
ideas for stretching the space beyond where
it's ever been before,
and that's really rewarding.
And every individual customer is getting
to benefit from that.
So this community is developing very, very nicely,
and it's serving the purposes of establishing this category
this new category
of business spend management
that we're all driving toward.
>> Talk about that cause that's something
that's pretty innovative
for Coupa.
Business spend management, the rule of procurement
has changed.
The role of finance has changed.
They have to opportunity to become very strategic
and really drive top line value.
Talk to us about business spend management
what it means, how Coupa is defining it.
>> Absolutely. Well first of all,
any person I ask in the world,
and I've been asking this question
for well over a decade now, do you think your company is
doing a great job in managing its spending on all the
business needs that the company has?
And you never get a resounding, positive answer
that, "Yes, we're doing a great job!"
and if you ask them, "Are you applying information
"technology to that problem in an effective way?"
the answers are even worse.
So we are attacking this full on with our customers
and establishing this space.
And that means everything from procurement
to expense reporting
to invoice processing
to payments
strategic sourcing, spend analytics, supplier management,
contract lifecycle management,
all of these application ares working together in concert
to help companies get their arms around spending
and manage it in a much more smart way.
And that's what this is all about.
>> One of the biggest challenges, is you think about poor IT,
because every, every line of business
whether you're in marketing
or finance,
or engineering
and you think, "Oh!"
Or engineering might say, "I want to user slack."
so start using slack.
Marketing wants to use SalesForce, whatever these tools are,
and suddenly there's this proliferation of shadow IT,
and challenging to manage
but you can imagine how many supplier contracts are being
duplicated, triplicated,
and even within the same organization,
not getting the ideal price.
So one of the great thing, big announcement, today
is the the expansion
of the relationship with Amazon in the AWS marketplace
and Wow! CIOs, IT folks are going to be able to do a lot
though the Coupa platform.
Tell us a little bit more about this.
>> Well first of all it's powered by an open by technology
that we've developed which allows you
to have a very seamless experience.
It's a purchasing experience
that feels just like you're out on the web looking
for any kind of item that you'd like to buy.
But now you'll be able to subscribe to services,
cloud based services, through the Amazon AWS marketplace.
And these are services that obviously would be approved
by your CIO, be approved by the folks involved in checking
that it's secure, approved by legal
and also approved by procurement.
So you can then procure these cloud based services
very, very seamlessly right out of Coupa
into AWS marketplace and back
and we think it's going to allow for obviously more volume
of controlled spend,
but also visibility into that spend
so it's properly managed.
>> That visibility is, you know, it's a word that we use
in so many different applications.
We all want better visibility in our lives in general,
but that is not easy to achieve.
You talked about kind of these four core categories,
you actually mentioned more
that Coupa delivers.
It's procurement, it's invoices, expenses,
I can imagine travel management, contingent worker,
getting an organization, whether it's a big organization
like a Staples,
or a smaller organization,
that visibility is massively game changing.
>> Yes, I think so.
And I think on of the things that allows us
to do that is we've really empowered the central hub
organizations, many of the ones you described,
to roll out platforms to the end users all over the country,
all over the world.
Wherever these people have employees,
to take control over spend
but have that spend still routed
to preferred, contractually righteous kind
of spend categories
that give them the results that they want.
So this is a platform that is getting wide, wide adoption
and I'll tell you, you know, in one of our application areas
we've seen more than a 3x acceleration in the number
of users over the last one year simply
because of the adoption is so broadly accepted.
That has to do with our design and technology,
make it very, very usable, our design concept
of the best UI is no UI, right?
So that's really how we're getting to where we're getting
with our customer community.
>> Adoption is challenging.
You know, if you look at the number of applications
that an organization has, again, work our list of size,
there's a lot.
And they're only effective
if they're being utilized effectively
by all of the folks that need to be doing that.
Talk a little bit more, I love how you in
your general session this morning, shared with the audience
what C-O-U-P-A, each acronym means,
and I saw that on the website.
The best UI is no UI.
What are some of the things
that you think Coupa is doing really well
that are really facilitating that adoption.
Cause that's again, that's hard to achieve.
>> Well it's in each of the letters in Coupa.
So first, a comprehensive approach,
that's what the C stands for.
So cover every area of spend in one platform.
We've never seen that before in the history
of enterprise software.
We've got a lot of siloed solutions all over the place
people trying to integrate them,
we've put this all on one comprehensive platform.
Secondly, doing it openly.
That's what the O stands for.
So being able to integrate to any ERP system,
integrate to a whole host of systems.
You mentioned Slack earlier, we integrate into Slack.
You could approve, or reject a spend purchase
directly in Slack.
You don't have to get out to Coupa to do it,
but you're doing it, the data's captured in Coupa.
U is the user centricity.
So putting all the weight on the application itself
and less of the weight on the employee themselves, right?
Now we support guided buying,
we support all these capabilities
but our focus is on, you don't need any guidance
in the future.
You shouldn't require any guidance.
It should be so intuitive.
The P stands for prescriptive.
And this is using this community data
we were discussing earlier
to give real prescriptive advice to each customer about
how they should be spending
or best practices of expenditures,
or benchmarks of how they could approve.
And the A stands for accelerated.
It's the time of deployment.
We're get our customers live in a matter of months.
They're accelerating their business processes internally.
I shared a stat
that our customers in the last 12 months
have improved the speed of their approvals
by 30%.
That's an aggregate.
That's millions and millions
and hundreds of billions of dollars spend volume
so these five areas really differentiate us,
and they're really the vision areas
that we focus on as a company
with our community of customers.
>> I was looking at some of the numbers from Coupa.
You guys have consistently managed
to grow revenues over 40% year over year.
In your fiscal year 20 Q1 earnings, which was just,
what, last month or so,
revenue up 44% year over year,
crushing Wall street's estimates
by more than a 10 point gap.
Lot of momentum as you mentioned,
let's talk about customers cause at the end of the day
that's what you're all working towards.
I know some of your proudest moments are when you get
to talk with customers
whose businesses have been transformed
and you're giving them that those ah ha moments
all the time.
I lovee this morning how there was a lot
of the voice of the customer covered there from
so many different industries.
The impact that you guys are making
at Rolls Royce for example,
and MasterCard, massive.
Tell me some of your favorite stories
that really articulate the breadth
and depth of the value that Coupa delivers.
>> I love it when the story begins in the situation
where the CEO or CFO of the company don't necessarily get it
but somebody within our community steps up
and show them the business case
of what we could achieve together
and then we as a team, as a collective unit deliver it
and achieve it.
So you look at Amazon themselves.
I mean they're processing more than 2 billion dollars
a month through our platform.
I mentioned Procter and Gamble, they process more than
50 billion dollars through our platform.
Now these are not initiatives,
these were early adopter customers.
They didn't have to go in our direction.
But there was some individual in that company
that saw the spark of opportunity,
seized it, got it approved,
and worked with us hand in hand
to drive it.
And that's the stories that I love the most,
and I shared so many of them this morning.
But there are literally hundreds of them all over the world
in this community we're cultivating.
>> There are and it's,
that's I think there's no better brand value
that you can get than it being articulated from the voice
of the successful customer who it's not just, "oh. We're
"more agile," or "We're saving money."
it's, "No, we're driving shareholder value."
there are significant business imperatives
that are being driven
because procurement is changing.
We've got to react to pricing pressures,
and forces like consumerization.
You know, we think of, we have these expectations
as consumers, in our private lives,
of getting anything we want within a day.
And when it shows, you forgot what you ordered,
it was that fast.
What you guys are doing,
to enable the business buyers
to have that same capability in their business lives.
But to get that visibility,
that 360 is really interesting.
>> And the key also is to handle all the complexity
on the back end for them.
I could tell you
so many companies I know
that are really proud of processing their paper based
invoices very, very quickly,
but they might not even know whether
or not they got the goods or services
for which they're paying the invoice.
So we do all
of that heavy lifting on the back end on the platform itself
alleviating the end users from
that complexity and allowing them to have the experience
that's similar to the one
that you just described.
>> Can you image how much money is being wasted on paper.
They probably have absolutely no idea.
Absolutely no idea.
Well you guys launched an index.
The Coupa Business Spend Index just, I think a month
or two ago.
This is behavioral based data
that you're gleaning from your community.
Talk to us about the Coupa Business Spend Index,
and some of the insights
that you're already uncovering about the economy.
>> Absolutely. So one of the things about this business
spending index, it's something I've been thinking about,
frankly, for over a decade.
Can we collect enough data
that's statistically significant enough,
to actually be a leading indicator
to future economic sentiment?
Now you think about the data we're looking
at in aggregate.
We know the average spend companies have per employee.
We know how long approval cycles are,
and we know the changes in those approval cycles.
We know what percentage of spend is actually being rejected
versus accepted at a moment's notice, aggregated.
Those are, in combination, are leading indicators
to the sentiment that companies have about
the future of the economy.
So we backwards tested this index that takes in account
these three elements I just described, back to 2016.
And it's proven to show a pretty strong correlation with
the way the economy actually played out
for many of those quarters, many of those quarters.
So last quarter we released our first
data set of the business spend index,
and it showed that future economic sentiment
for the next three to four months is actually very positive.
Now, in some industries more than others.
But now, we're three months later,
and clearly the last three months have been pretty strong.
So we're going to be soon releasing our next
quarterly business index,
and we're going to be doing this every quarter
to try to provide the business community with insights
about where things are going.
That's what everyone in business wants to know,
where things are going,
not where things have been.
And we think we're in a unique position to share that,
and also sort of unfairly build awareness
for our brand out there
so that people understand what we're all about.
>> But that, that's critically.
I'm going to be talking to Chandar tomorrow
and I think of awareness, acquisition, yes, yes, advocacy,
yes, check, check, check.
All three of those are critical.
Last question, Rob, for you, is we look
at the impact that procurement
and getting this visibility
of all of the businesses spend can have on the business,
where is it
as it relates to enabling businesses
to digitally transform to be competitive?
>> Well look, underlying all
of this is the digital transformation
that's happening for every company
and every industry without a doubt.
But the use cases we support are so quantifiable
they're so clear,
not only in terms of cost savings,
not only in terms of compliance,
not only in terms of visibility
and getting your arms around spend,
they actually drive revenue as well.
If you do spend management effectively, you can change
the way consumers experience your brand.
And I shared a number of those stories.
MGM Resorts,
to Lululemon
to the Leukemia and Lymphoma society,
and others.
If you can get your arms around the spend
and get people in the company the goods
and services they need in record time,
they are better positioned
to express the companies vision,
to help them push towards incredible,
iconic customer experiences.
And we're just
so proud to be able to power that
for this fast growing community
of customers around the world.
>> Such an exciting time, Rob.
Thank you for having theCUBE at Inspire19.
It's been great so far looking forward
to talking with lots more of your folks
as well as amazing innovators
and thinkers like Suzie Orman
and Deepak Chopra.
Wow! Awesome stuff.
>> Thank you.
>> Well thanks for having us.
>> Thank you.
>> All right, for Rob Bernshteyn, I am Lisa Martin.
You're watching theCUBE from Coupa Inspire19.
Thanks for watching.
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