Coupa Express is the world’s leading open source project for e-procurement. It includes support for employee requisitioning, purchase order creation, and PO transmission to suppliers. Built using Ruby on Rails, Coupa Express includes native support for Web 2.0 capabilities like drag-and-drop shopping and tagging.

Coupa Express is sponsored by Coupa Software, an on demand e-procurement vendor that offers simple, quick and affordable hosted purchasing systems. In addition to its on demand offering, Coupa Software also offers production support for businesses interested in running the open source solution with the peace of mind of knowing someone is there to help if needed.

Coupa Express History

The first version of Coupa Express was released in July 2006. The original target date of July 4th (which we missed by a few weeks) coincided with Independence Day in the United States, and was symbolic of the goal of the project - to “free” businesses from stale, expensive, and old-fashioned purchasing systems that cost too much to buy and even more to own and operate.

The project grew quickly, achieving 99% activity status on Sourceforge (a miracle for boring e-procurement software) in a matter of months. After 3 betas, a 1.0 version was introduced in March 2007 - and the current 1.5 version has been available since August 2007. The project has surpassed 12K downloads, with production use in most continents.

Coupa Software continues to act as primary contributor to and champion of Coupa Express. In addition, Coupa Software offers a convenient on demand service at a fraction of the cost of traditional enterprise software. More information about Coupa Software and its on demand solution can be found at http://www.coupa.com.

Coupa Express Developer Hall-Of-Fame

Coupa Express may be an open source project, but its primary ongoing code contribution comes from a few pretty amazing developers. Sure, this section could talk about Dave Stephens and Noah Eisner, Coupa’s founders. And it’s fair to say they have shaped the open source product - both through vision and functional design. But this section is about the developers themselves. No managers allowed

David Williams (aka Kingpin)

David is a pragmatic perfectionist and Coupa’s resident expert in user interface “stylishness”. He also happens to be the most prolific coder of Coupa Express, and the project’s technical leader. As a Caltech alum, he harbors a deep curiosity about the universe. He enjoys cooking, eating (not necessarily in that order), music of all kinds, and all-things-Apple.

Seggy Umboh (aka Ladies’ Man)

For Seggy, elegance is synonymous with correctness. Each project Seggy undertakes is coded with at least 4 or 5 different approaches until the perfect one clicks into shape. Seggy has a natural ability with logic and algorithms and loves automation and packaging.

Although quiet as a church mouse, Seggy has an inner wild side, as evidenced by his love of motorcycles, or his collection of cars (Porsche, RX-7, Prius, or his Kit-car).

Graduating from CMU in 3 years was one of Seggy’s many accomplishments prior to Coupa.

Brian Kennedy (aka Blue Collar)

Brian is one of those guys who is smarter than he looks. A native San Franciscan, Brian grew up bum-rushing 49ers games and avoiding serious trouble through a combination of brains and luck. Graduating from UC Davis in CS, one of Brian’s greatest technical achievements prior to Coupa was at Apple, where he wrote the installation platform for all Apple products that run on a PC, including iTunes.

Brian is most likely to say something in the office that will both create an HR violation and leave the entire development staff laughing until they cry.

Graham Melcher (aka Young Buck)

Graham is probably the only microbiology major to have two award winning computer science projects. And no live animals were used to test them either.

He spends most evenings playing board games (Puerto Rico and Settlers of Catan are his favorites), rock climbing and doing yoga at mission cliffs (we couldn’t make this up if we tried), or awkwardly participating in the local indie music scene.

Shockingly, Graham is an experienced country line dancer, which he only sometimes denies when confronted.

Graham was hired into the Coupa development team in part to bring Cal an early lead in the Cal/Stanford office graduate competition. Prior to graduating from UC Berkeley he was lead programmer at ResComp, which you’ve probably never heard of but is super-impressive nonetheless.