A lot of people ask me about Coupa’s business model, and why in particular we sponsor Coupa e-Procurement Express - the leading open source project for e-Procurement. After all, aren’t on demand and open source two fundamentally different approaches to building software?

YES they are! The primary reason has to do with audience. Open source software appeals to a tech-savvy crowd who often serves in IT departments inside businesses. On demand software, or a SaaS approach, appeals to a business crowd who intentionally shy away from anything too technical & focus on results.

On the surface if you look at a comparable market to Procurement, like CRM, you see companies that have chosen one or the other. Salesforce.com is the poster child for SaaS. SugarCRM is the poster child for open source.

But dig deeper into their models and you find these two companies have a lot in common. Salesforce has active open source projects around adapters to Order Management and in other relevant places “around the edges” of their infrastructure. The offer and re-host a number of “free” plug-ins through AppExchange as well. SugarCRM, meanwhile, has a growing on demand business as “an alternative to Salesforce” (and RightNow & others).

To me, the underlying trend behind both models is transparency. Open source says “hey, go ahead, look at the code & see that it’s good. contribute back if you can - but there’s nothing we’re trying to hide.” SaaS / on demand says “buy a 1-year subscription and let me show you the business results - there’s no lock-in - no games.”

For Coupa, sponsoring the e-Procurement Express open source project has helped us get valuable feedback on ways to improve. At the same time it’s helped organizations with a very limited budget for e-Procurement pursue the initiative anyway. It’s also ensured the kernel of our on demand service - the core transactional engine - is rock solid. The on demand service, meanwhile, has blossomed very nicely since our formal launch last October 22nd. Transaction volume is scaling quickly, and the business audience has been attracted to how quick and easy it is to get started.

So for us, on demand and open source are like peas and carrots. Open source and on demand are complimentary and both serve us well.

d

We’re excited to announce the general availability of our open source project, Coupa e-Procurement Express v1.5. In addition to the team here,many thanks to several people in the Coupa community that helped us with QA, documentation and get the word out.

We heard many of your requests over the last several months and which helped to shape the v1.5 release. As promised, there are a ton of new capabilities which are listed here. Some of the most hotly desired features include:

• Multi-currency support
• Self-approvals
• Purchase order change and revisioning
• Improved tables and searching
• CSV catalog upload

Of course, you can download the application today, which is now just the source code. We strongly encourage you to post your comments, experiences, suggestions, flames, etc. on our Forums. We’ll be sending out Coupa T-shirts to our active posters.

Noah