In case you haven’t heard, there’s a real change afoot in how companies are building and delivering their solutions. We all probably know how Google has revolutionized how we work, search and do most things. But they’ve also enabled other companies with new business models that couldn’t have been successful without Google’s platform. Another leader in helping to bring about change is Amazon. Yes, that same e-tailer who seems to ship my wife new books on a daily basis has somewhat quietly emerged as a technology company.
Amazon’s technology division is called Amazon Web Services and they held an event at Stanford yesterday called the Start-Up Project. They did a nice job of showcasing their capabilities, but mostly let some of their customers give real feedback on using AWS. AWS is composed of a bunch of services to enable what Amazon loves to refer to as “Web Scale” computing…essentially, scalable, reliable, cost-effective storage and computing. The core services of AWS are S3, a low-cost storage service, and EC2, essentially a virtual data center. These services allow companies to spin up computing power when you need it, and ratchet it down when you don’t. So rather than buying some servers and running them in a data center hoping that demand stays within your servers’ capacity, you can use AWS and add more virtual servers on the fly and take them offline when demand decreases. You pay for what you use. You can probably find some similarities / analogies in the procurement space. Amazon doesn’t want companies to focus on the ugly stuff (buying equipment, getting your data center up and maintaining it, etc.) that every technology company needs, but wants them to focus on their unique service that differentiates them. The AWS motto is “We make muck, so you don’t have to”.
Several companies did a quick overview on how they use AWS. Jon Boutelle of Slideshare did a particularly funny take on it, although you may not get it from his slides. Smugmug’s CEO showed how they saved $692K in the last year with AWS. Then Randy Komisar from KPCB talked about the development process in startups, getting early feedback and the “dashboard” or iterative development process. His point was that startups can do this now with lots less capital and time than was possible ten years ago. At the cocktail hour, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, and John Doerr, the legendary VC, made surprise visits and speeches.
Why was Coupa there? Simple. We’re an AWS customer and wanted to see how some of our peers are getting value. From backup, storage, hosting and more, AWS frees us from the muck, allows us to have a scalable, reliable infrastructure for our on-demand solutions. We can focus on new feature development and customer service, not spending time in a data center plugging in cables.
My favorite thing (at least work-related) is designing new capabilities to make our customers more efficient. The ideas come from everywhere…stuff our customers mention, stuff that we come up with in late-night brainstorming sessions, side projects that could only come from the great minds of our developers, etc. Our September release typifies this. I won’t give you the full laundry list of capabilities, but highlight some of the more interesting.
“Enhanced Special Approvers” is a cool feature to build approval paths without all the complexity of getting someone technical to write custom workflows. Now, you can create all kinds of normal and crazy rules, in addition to using normal management hierarchy, to make sure the right people approve the right requisitions. For instance, you can say “in addition getting normal management approvals, I want any requisition over $2,500 that is charged to an asset account to be approved by Tim the Controller and if it is over $15,000 then it also needs Sue the CFO’s approval.” That’s a pretty normal one, but you can make create your own crazy rules based in item description, requisition amount, supplier, department, account and more. And you can even specify if these special approvers should come before or after the management hierarchy. Best of all, business users can create these rules in the Coupa UI.
“Line-Level Accounting” is one of the highly requested capabilities that we’re excited to announce. Now, when you checkout, you can charge the requisition to multiple internal accounts. So, if I’m buying a computer and some office supplies, I might charge the computer to an “IT equipment” account and the office supplies to an “indirect supplies” account.
“Advanced Search” is one of the features designed and developed by David, our head engineer, who wanted an elegant way for our customers to create queries in the system. For all of the tables, such as viewing requisitons, purchase orders, invoices, RFQs, you can now do advanced searches in addition to the basic search. So you can now create a search to find all requisitions where the requisition was submitted between 8/23 and 9/4 for Dell from department ABC.
There are a bunch of other new features including delegate approvals (great for when you are on vacation!), allowing certain approvers to edit a requisition when they are approving it, enhanced price precision so you can buy stuff for less than a cent (needed for our E&C customers who buy cabling at 1.0549 USD) and many more. We’d be glad to give you more details…just fill out the Contact Us form on the site.
Last, but certainly not least, is the value of On-Demand. Two weeks ago, we let our customers know about the new capabilities that would be coming. And last Friday night, we upgraded all of our customers, so by 10pm, they immediately had access to all these new features. Our customers didn’t have to worry about getting the right patches, getting IT to install them in the right order, running all the data migrations, bringing back up the application, web servers, mail servers, etc and all the associated monitoring. They can focus on the procurement business processes, not a slew of technical requirements.
