The Coupa team, along with around 3,000 other supply management & purchasing professionals, descended on St. Louis for a wonderful conference sponsored by the Institute for Supply Management.

We exhibited and had a great event, meeting old friends and making new ones. Here’s what our booth looked like (click to get full size image):

My favorite topic at the show was Green Purchasing. This is such a complex and important area that it is fascinating to wade into and learn the real challenges firms are wrestling with. One attendee who was a high-volume wine manufacturer shared his challenges of vendor “green-washing”. It was tough to know what the truth was on the sustainability of his supplies and the alternatives he was considering.

St. Louis was a fun place for the event. The Arch is a must-see, and Busch Stadium runs a close 2nd. And for those new to Purchasing and Supply Management, the ISM is a great organization to network in & learn from. So consider joining- follow this link to their signup site.

E-Procurement vendors like Coupa love bad times just as well as good times. There’s nothing like a recession to get businesses to pay attention to their operational efficiency and control. When growing revenue seems harder and harder to achieve, a great way to maintain profits is to turn to purchasing automation and control. We’re hearing this more and more these days.

I’ve seen discipline exercised in different ways at different firms. Some very large firms, so used to managing to quarterly expectations, would sometimes turn off their purchasing & travel expenditure programs to control spending. “There’s a travel & buying freeze” they’d say. But these firms already had effective and disciplined buying habits in place.

For small and midsized businesses so intent on growing the top-line, inefficiency and wasteful spending sometimes run wild. These firms can rein in uncontrolled spending quite rapidly through automating and streamlining their corporate purchasing. Coupa can help - with one of the easiest and most affordable on demand e-procurement systems out there. All you need is a web browser to get started. And a desire to maintain profits in turbulent economic times.

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We’ve built a dedicated site for our open source community. As we near 10K downloads and witness more and more systems in production use, we thought it made sense to offer a better way for people to get the information they needed about using Coupa Express. Contribute ideas, solutions, or even code. We hope you like it!

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.