(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the CUBE's Coverage of Coupa Inspire 2022 at the Cosmopolitan in bustling Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, and very pleased to be welcoming back. One of our CUBE alumni, the chairman and CEO of Coupa, the man himself Rob Bernshteyn, Rob great to have you back on the program. >> Great to be with you again. >> It's great to be in person. >> Sure. >> I applaud Coupa for taking the risk and getting all the people here. People are absolutely ready for this. And if there's a company that brings the energy it's Coupa. >> Well, thank you for saying that, we're definitely feeling it. You're right, we took a bit of a risk when we opened up registration that was before COVID, omicron hit. We didn't know what would happen, but we just had such an overwhelming onslaught of registrations and people wanted to be here. And in the last two days of interaction with folks it's just been like a huge reunion after three years of kind of being in home and away. >> Absolutely a huge reunion. One that was, I just felt so normal walking into your keynote yesterday. And of course, I always look for numbers because I know you're going to have numbers. 3.3 trillion, spend under management. You're almost at a trillion, a year run rate, that's huge. The growth of Cuopa, just up into the right. >> It is and it's really in thanks to our customer community. I mean, there are just incredible champions here. Courageous folks that are pushing for change inside their of companies. And we're honored to be the technology platform that drives a lot of that change. A more and more spend driven through the system that spend being optimized going to the right channels. Companies are saving money and it's given them more fuel to pursue their own missions and visions and everything that their companies seek to do. >> I just had a conversation with a customer about an hour ago and he was talking about everything was paper-based, manual, no visibility, and I've talked to other customers and I think I've got Jabil on this afternoon who had like 6 billion in indirect spend. They couldn't see. And with Cuopa, the blinders are off. And there's that visibility, the BSM community is really helping organization glean value, drive profitability. Talk to me about from your perspective how the BSM community has grown to be able to deliver, as you say, value as a service. >> Look what's happening is that the customers we have, we have over 2,500 customers around the world. Every one of these customers, they have their own missions. They have their own visions, they're pursuing their goals, but in order to do that, they need energy. They need gas in their tank, right? And with every dollar we save them, with every method we allow them to become more efficient in the way that they work, the way that they have visibility, the way that they collaborate one another, the way that they think about fulfillment of demand through supply chain design, or sourcing activities, contract negotiations, procurement, sourcing, treasury the way they manage that cash. It's unlocking that firepower. It's given them more gas in the tank and that's incredibly rewarding for me and my colleagues and everyone here because our mission is the amplification of all of their missions on a daily basis, really. >> Right, that amplification that acceleration the AI and Coupa. I got to see you about, about a year and a half ago. We were a few months into the pandemic but I'm just curious what some of the customer conversations are that you've had given the challenges with the supply chain that's on the lips of every politician and pretty much everybody. What are some of the things that Coopa has really helped customers to mitigate? >> Well, first of all, the simplest things were when everyone went home they couldn't do those paper based processes anymore. So they leverage our platform much more, right? I mean, they couldn't write paper checks for example and go in the office and do that. And that's just a simple example, order things or or get goods and services to their folks that are now working from home, for example. But then they're also faced with the acute issue of supply chain needs and the agility of their supply chain. So we help them figure out different ways to transport the goods and services they need, different freighting routes in real time through our AI capabilities. So, I mean, those are just some of the examples but we really think of our value proposition as almost like a Swiss army knife. And what happened during COVID is, you know we went out into the jungle and you didn't know which of those tools you would've needed but we tried to be right there with our customer to give them, you know, the knife, the match, the scissors, the, you know the fishing line, whatever was needed at that point in time to help them survive and thrive. And that's really how we see ourselves is you know, a true partner to our customers. >> Yeah, a true enabler. Well, I was looking at your FY22 numbers growth in new business in excess of 60% percent record annual revenue, 725, be up for up 34% subscription revenue up. Coupa up into the right. >> Well, it is, and what we're trying to be very thoughtful with this business. We're trying not to grow so fast that suddenly we leave our customers behind. We really try to take it one customer at a time, but the beauty of this growth, this measured and thoughtful growth is that this, we have an incredible renewal rate. I mean, our customers stay with us and they add more and more capabilities. And that drives an incredible cash flow situation for our business. And that makes us as Coupa very resilient. That's why we love being so transparent with our customers. Here's our growth, here's our margins, here's our cash flow. Here's how we're investing into R&D and innovation. Here's the M&A that we're doing to bring you a greater set of value propositions. And I love that transparency. It's one of the beauties of being a public company everything's out there and everyone can see and decide whether they want to be a customer, be an investor, be a colleague. It's a wonderful thing. >> Talk about the power of the community. Community AI launched in FY22. You showed some numbers and just the power of all of that anonymized, aggregated data to be analyzed. What is that? How has that really driven the evolution of Coupa in the last 13 years you've been at the helm? >> Well, we set our sites on doing this as far back as 13 years ago. I know you interviewed Donna recently and she was sharing with you that we set up our contracts with the customers in a way where we could take their anonymized sanitized data, aggregate it, and see if we can glean insights from it that could be used to the benefit of each individual customer. Really break the silos of traditional enterprise software. You know, where you do one deployment at a time and you live in your own little silo in your own little world. Now we're pushing, you know, a myriad of prescriptions out to each of our customers. They can see the best ways in real time to avoid supplier risk for example, make sure that the goods and services they buy they get on time at the right price points, make sure that the suppliers that they're working with support their diverse needs, their minority own supplier needs. All of the transparency that comes with seeing trillions of dollars in data in real time and gleaning insights from it. And we're just scratching the surface in this area. We're absolutely just scratch and service. We've pushed out this platform to our customers and now they're coming back to us and saying, wow, could I glean this sign insight from the community? What if we can get access to that information? And we're encoding that for them and pushing that information and those applications out to them. So this is going to be an exciting couple of months and quarters and years to take this concept of community AI to a completely different level. And I think it's not only new for Coupa, but I really see it as something completely new for the enterprise software industry where the opportunity to break silos is really upon us. >> It's critical, but a lot of communities are very transactional episodic, Coupa isn't like that. >> Well, you know that there's no shortcut to that. That has taken 13 years. And I think that begins with the O in Coupa which is the openness, the openness, the transparency the authenticity in which we, with which we engage with our customers. They understand how we work. They have access to all of our other customers. They can interface with them and interact with them within their own industry, within their own company size, whether they're the largest companies in the world, or you know, upper mid-market or mid-market customers whether they're subscribing to our treasury applications or our supply chain or procurement applications. And by having access to this community in real time and a community that's grounded in that trust and authenticity, you know, only great things happen. Only great things happen. >> The trust in a authenticity is critical. It's easy to say, you can trust us. We're authentic. It's a whole other thing to actually feel it and believe it and see it. And you get that sense here from your keynote. Barbara Corcoran was fantastic. Inspiring, I loved how she said she'd probably never had an original good idea herself that always gets them from others. And I thought that's Coupa to me, that's the spirit of community, the spirit of collaboration. All of those Cs to me embody what Coupa is. >> Exactly, exactly. None of us is as smart as all of us. That's what it is. No doubt. >> It's true that power of that community is. And I think I read in Fast Company just really recently that you described the community AI as a moonshot. And I thought, where is he going to go from here? (laughing) >> Well, it's continuing to build on this concept. It's really continuing to build on this concept of breaking these siloed data stores, aggregating them and distilling insights from them in ways that we ourselves as Coupa, as our R&D team or Raj and our product team we don't know all the different ways the customers will want to use this power of community. But we know we have a very scalable underlying platform that operates in virtually every language and virtually every currency that will be there to support their evolving needs. As we continue our, you know, what we hope to be lifelong relationship with our customers. >> I was talking to one of your customers. I think it was Jabil recently, and we're having them on the program today. And they actually said they were an SAP ERP shop. They could have gone the SAP route and chose Coupa. And one of the main reasons was because Coupa was going to be able to evolve with them, but allow them to help Coupa evolve. And I get that sense from a lot of your customers that we have the opportunity to influence the direction that the technology goes. Because we are here in the back office now moving to the front. >> Rob: That's right. >> In a day to day, really figuring out what if it did this? What if it did that? Now it does all of these things because the community gets to be that influential >> That's right. And we also, the beauty is we're able to help them. Our customers unlock the value of their investments into core ERP platforms, whether it be SAP or Oracle a host of other ERPs, we help them get strategic leverage from those applications. And we're building this company very much on the shoulders of early, you know, enterprise software companies like themselves. So it's really a beautiful, you know relationship with our customers, but also a way to, to give them more and more leverage >> That's critical. Especially as every company these days it has to be a data company, but they have to be able to see the data, glean insights act on it, make pivots. It's one of the words that we probably use so often in the last two years is pivot, but I think without these companies having a data strategy from a competitive perspective, their toast. >> I think so I think it's really tough. You know, I frame it very simply. We spent many, many years in the industrial revolution. We're worried about, you know, physical labor, moving parts. We entered into the information revolution with the advent you know, the internet and now I think we're really in what I would call the knowledge revolution it's, as you said, it's not only the data, but gleaning valuable insights from that massive growing data store and delivering them at the point of need so that people can take advantage of that insight and that knowledge. And, you know, we're proud to be on the forefront of that as a growing, you know, technology company, a cloud based what we call values as a service company. >> Value as service, right. You mentioned in your keynote, you were talking about the the struggles of being a parent during the pandemic and trying to get your kids to watch some of the classics. I know it was right there with you, Superman, Rocky, was it Planes, Trains & Automobiles, that's another one, and I thought you mentioned, you know my kids had about three minutes of attention span. I thought in the business world, people have three seconds. The real time, get me what I need in the point of time when they need it. Is critical for every business in every industry because the consumer is so, our demands are just higher and higher. >> That's right. That's right. And you know, the U in Coupa stands for user centricity and the logic there was simply, if the machine could do the majority of the work there should be less and less stress upon the end user the user themselves, as I say, deliver exactly what they need at the point of need to them on the screen or on their phone or wherever it is so that they could keep business moving forward as efficiently thoughtfully and optimally as possible. And you know we take the responsibility as a value of service company, you know very seriously try to make sure that we optimize the time spent of the sort of the man machine, woman machine interaction then less and less is on the, on the man or woman, and much much more is on the, you know the platform that we continue to develop. >> One of the things I read that you said in the press release I think it was yesterday's, chief financial officers, chief information officers, CEOs, they need to be chief transformation officers. That's a hard thing to do, especially for, I can imagine organizations like I had Casey's General Store on, this is a company that was founded in the fifties. How are you seeing that manifest into reality when you're talking with those CFOs and CEOs, are they really becoming those chief transformation officers? >> Well, they're all aspiring to it and we're, in my view proudly helping them move as quickly as possible toward that end, to have companies that are highly agile, that can respond to shift and consumer demands, consumer needs, shifting supply chain, you know, challenges, shifting financial scenarios out in the marketplace given the volatility of the stock market. So if we could offer that agility and resiliency and that additional stool of digital transformation for CEOs, CFOs and CIOs, and, you know we're doing something special out there. >> So Rob, last question for you. What does tomorrow look like for Coupa? What are we going to see and feel next year? Any crystal ball insight you can share with me? >> You know, I don't know. One of the things about us is we're not we're a little bit of a boring company. It's one quarter after the next week. >> I saw the dancing video that is not boring. (Rob laughing) >> But you know, it's been what, 52 quarters of going at it, one quarter at a time, one customer at a time one interaction at a time, one line of code at a time, you know, one QA assurance at a time, one support ticket at a time just moving forward moving forward, moving forward. And before, you know, it, you turn around, you look around and we began as you know, know a couple of handfuls of people with a desire to inspire an industry is starting to take shape. And we feel like, you know, we're not just getting started, but we're certainly in the early innings of I think creating a very special company and more importantly, a very special community around the company that we're forming. I would say a very special community. Rob, great to have you on the program, congrats on doing the event in person, getting all of these people that are so ready to see you guys and to be able to interact with Coupa and its partner ecosystem, getting us all together. One of my favorite events, we appreciate you stopping by on the CUBE. >> Thank You. Thanks for having me again. >> All right. For Rob Bernshteyn, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE's coverage of day two Coupa Inspire 2022 from Las Vegas. Stick around. My next guest will join me shortly. (lighthearted music)

(upbeat music) >> Good afternoon from Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, at The Cosmopolitan, here on day two of theCUBE's coverage of Coupa Inspire 2022. I'm excited to be joined by one of Coupa's many successful customers, Jaime Robles joins me, the chief procurement officer at Casey's General Stores. You're going to be talking about building a technology hub with source-to-pay and interconnecting ecosystem platforms. Welcome, Jaime. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's a pleasure to be here today in this week, hearing about Coupa and all the fabulous things that we can do around technology. >> Coupa is amazing, and in terms of their innovation, I don't know if you had a chance to see the Keynote this morning, but the slides that Raja showed with just the arrow going up and to the right. Talk to us a little bit about Casey's General Stores. This is the U.S's fourth largest convenience store retailer. But just for the audience who may not know, give us a background. >> So, just a little bit about Casey's. So, Casey's is, as you said, one of the largest convenience store chains out there. We got more than 2,500 locations in 16 states in the Midwest in the U.S. And just out of curiosity, we are the fifth largest pizza company as well. >> Lisa: Is that right? >> We make a great pizza and our guests love it. So, we are in three businesses. We are in convenience store, we are in fuel, and also we are in the food business, because we got a kitchen inside every single store that we got out there. So, for us it's been a fabulous journey with procurement, because we came to the company, joined the company two years ago in the middle of pandemic, and the whole idea was to build the procurement function from the ground up. Casey's didn't have a formal procurement function. So, pretty much, all the spend was done by the functions, by themselves, but no formal process, no technology, no platforms, nothing; very old school. And we came here to build a foundation and build, as I call it, a procurement tech house. >> A procurement tech house. So, talk to me, so I know that Casey's dates back to 1959, and what you described sounds like a lot of paper-based, manual processes; technology really wasn't in the mix. Is that what attracted you to take the role going, "I want to bring technology and build this powerhouse"? >> Yes, that was amazing. So, over my career, I've been doing this for several companies, such as in the past, in Phillips, G, and recently, with Walmart. And then, what attracted me for this opportunity was, well, everything is paper. Everything is manual. There's nothing digital in this company. There's no team, there's no sourcing, no process, no policies. It's like building everything from the ground up. So, it was very attractive. It's huge opportunities for the company, and we were going through this massive transformation to digitize the company all across the operations. So, procurement wasn't the core of those strategies for the CEO of the company, and that's what the opportunity lies. He was like, "How do we move from manual transactions to all this digital world?" and where, now everything is frictionless, that we move from 80%, 85%, that it was all manual. Now we are plus 65%, everything is digital now in the company, and just within one year of moving all over. So, the savings, the cost, the, the leakage, all the waste on the processes that we have, is just amazing, after one year. >> Sounds like the company had a cloud, a digitization strategy, brought you on board to help make that a reality for procurement. So, the appetite was there at Casey's from a cultural perspective, it wasn't battling uphill to get folks to go, "Let go of the paper. Let's go to Coupa." >> Yeah, that's the truth. So, it was the whole digital transformation for the company, not only on the procurement, spend side, but all the process in the company. So, as COVID hit our stores and the whole world, right? So, we had to move into more digital ordering, into more digital transaction, into more how my guests can interact with my stores without going to the stores, how they can order from the app, how they can get their food directly to their house, and all this stuff. And procurement was right there, hand to hand, as part of those strategies from the very beginning. And we were, I will say, very lucky to be on time to make all those digital transformations for the company, so when the COVID really hit, we were ready and prepared to take over. >> That's good, being ready and prepared. Oh my gosh. But some of the few people I've talked to. Talk to me about the core technology requirements that you had for the right BSM solution, and why Coupa ticked all those boxes. >> Yeah. So for us, it was one of the most important ones is as I said, bring the digital across the whole source to pay. Another big element for us, it was, how do we bring transparency into the process? How do we bring transparency on how much we pay, how do we spend our money, Which areas, which categories? We built a model in cases that are called, it's a self-service model. And this self service model is, I put the technology in its core, which is Coupa, and I give my users and my internal stakeholders all the power to take those decisions. So, now they can see how much they spend in different categories, with different suppliers, for the preferred vendors, what type of contracts do we have? And how do we manage that spend, versus the budget, as well? They have all that ability to take those decisions, and they don't need a procurement team. As I like to call, in my couple of speaker notes during this week, we like to make procurement invisible. We are in the back, they don't see us. And they got all the power to use the technology out there to do the job for us. >> Transparent, but empowered at the same time. >> Exactly, exactly. That's what we want, moving forward for this company. And I believe that is the vision that we got in the procurement 2.0. >> Procurement 2.0. Talk to me about some of the solutions that you implemented. You talked about source-to-pay, but give us kind of an idea if you double click on that, and then we'll kind of unpack ` what you talked about on your sessions. >> Yeah, pretty much, for Coupa, we implemented the whole source to pay. So, from sourcing, procurement, invoicing and payment. So, we implement all that at the core of the Coupa. I believe in an ecosystem of procurement technologies that are interconnected with Coupa, to interact for other needs, like contract lifecycle management, tail spend management, TNE, and some others that we're going after. Like, now for us, is going after supplier data hub, which for us is very important also to get it right. And that procurement ecosystem of different technologies connected is going to give us the ability to move faster, to be more lean and to have better data and technology accessible for the team that is in charge of procurement, to operate under that environment. >> You mentioned a few minutes ago that, when the pandemic hit, Casey's was ready, from a digital perspective. I imagine that was a huge advantage, going into such unknown times that we're still kind of in. >> Well, when I say ready, it's like, we were ready to go, and we were on the fly, implementing everything, and what the pandemic did is to accelerate all this. So, as many companies did, we were already in the process of going this direction, and when the pandemic start hitting, we accelerate everything, and we made it happen. So, we went live in three, four months, and a year later, we were completely live since we joined the company, and we were start seeing all this paying coming to ours. So, 18 months later, we are pretty much hitting best in class levels in terms of transactional, operational, tactical, savings, visibility, spend, transparency, risk management. Now we're going to take it to the next level of the maturity. It's like, how do we go for ESG? How do we go for supplier diversity? How do we manage risk management? Right? And all those things. >> You had a couple of presentations here at Inspire, talk to me about those, and some of the top takeaways that the audience gleaned from you. >> Yeah, one of the most important ones yesterday was about how to build a procurement organization from the ground up, or how to go through a digital transformation in procurement. That is something that has been on the topic on the procurement community for years now. Everybody talks about procurement transformation, et cetera. And I just showed to them, my journey in the companies that I've been doing this for the last two decades, across the world, in many different countries, and the things that work and the and the things that doesn't work, really. And how they need to build, for the future of procurement, a technology procurement house on the core. And that's how you operate day to day. And for us, organization was Coupa. And then on top of that, you need to build a procurement ops model, right? How you want to operate your procurement operating model. So, it's centralized, decentralized, a hybrid model. And it all depends about the type of company, the type of industry you are, how material is your organization, et cetera. And another big, big element in all your strategy is, how you're going to serve your customers, right? What type of service model do you have in place? If you're going to be like a full service mode, or you going to be in a strategic direction, or you going to be a self-service mode. And pretty much, what we have chosen as the best way to move forward in the future is, let's put the technology in the middle. Let's give the support our users need, but let them be self-service, and let's make our job invisible in the back, where we have all these sourcing events, all these beautiful negotiations, all these great deals, contracts, et cetera. So, by the time they use the technology, they know where to buy, how to buy, what's the right level, how to make it happen, and they don't need us. They can do it by their own. >> And they've got that visibility, that before, it sounds like they didn't have it at all. >> Exactly, so now we know how much we spend, where do we spend, and where are the opportunities? Where are some gaps that we can go after, as well? And I think one of the most important aspects in these transformations that many of my colleagues are going through is, then you have a model that you can repeat year over year and evolve with the company, so it's agile and it's flexible. Because companies keep evolving. You buy business, you sell business, you acquire, you expand, you grow, and how that model is going to shape around. So, by the time you're done, it's not obsolete again. So, technology is going to keep evolving with your model, and that for me, is the key part in all this. >> Do you feel like, this is a marketing term; future-proof, and it always is one of those things that, well what does that actually really mean? Do you feel though that, what you've put in place is future-proof? That it's going to be able to grow and scale as the company changes? >> Jaime: Totally, totally. Because as I said before, we put the technology on the core. And for us, having that technology on the core, and plugging different technologies around that and sourcing around that with our amazing sourcing team, is going to evolve whatever the company needs. If we expand into different regions, we're ready. If we expand into different business types, we're ready. I believe what we need to keep evolving, as well, is, there will be new emerging technologies. There's going to be way more AI. There's going to be way more machine learning. There's going to be more predictive analytic sourcing stuff. How do we keep pulling those technologies into our platforms to keep giving us that advantage and that edge to the market? I think we have the model, and I think it's one of the most advanced procurement functions that I've seen in the industries around. >> And it sounds like you designed and deployed it really quickly, >> We did. >> especially during a global crisis. >> Yeah, we are disruptors by nature. We love change. We love speed. And that is, I will say my procurement brand. We make it happen and we make it fast. That's how we do it. We keep momentum. >> That's incredibly important. I mean, one of the things that we've learned, many things the last two years, a couple things. Access to realtime data is no longer a "nice to have." It's absolutely business critical. The patience of many people, including myself, was quite thin, the last two years. But also, every company has to be a data company. Casey's has to be a data company. If I have the ability to order from my app, or order things, I want them to know when I'm here for, what I ordered before; make my visit personalized, efficient, easy. So, that data strategy, having that data at the core, is nowadays, you have to have it. >> It is essential. We're building a data hub for the company, completely showing us all that information. As you can imagine, being in those three business, on the food industry, on the retail convenience store, and in the fuel, so data for us is our living breath every single day. And not only having the data now, it's like, what type of decisions we're taking with all this data? And how fast we are adapting to all that, in pricing, in cost, in margin and availability and inventory and logistics and transportation, and in your whole supply chain. So, that is extremely important for us. Not only having the data, but what kind of decisions we're taking with the data, and everything starts with the transparency right? Whenever you see it, you act. >> You should be able to act, but to your point, you have to have that visibility. You have to be able to see it and act on it. Talk to me about what it's like being a Coupa customer. I know how I've been to many Inspires, and I always love seeing all the customer success stories everywhere across industries. What's it like being a Coupa customer, in terms of having the ability to influence, say, the roadmap? Is that something that you're able to work on in partnership with Raj's team? >> Yeah, that's great. So, Coupa has been a great company to work with, and I know them for some years now, and not only they been able to support our vision of what we're trying to build, but at the same time they're taking many of our feedback to make Coupa better, in many of the different models. Listen, Coupa's not perfect, right? And I don't think any tool out there is going to be perfect. But being in so many different industries and with so many opportunities in different areas, they've been able to take our feedback and make those improvements for ourselves. We have so many conversations with the Coupa product development team when we were going through a transformation, asking them for things that we thought it was very valuable to have on the tool, that was in our, in our eyes, no brainer, and they were very, very fast to react and make the change. And we are, I think, one of the most lousy customers, guilty as charged about that, but we just wanted to make it better because it's a benefit of the whole community. Everything that we've been talking this week about community AI, it's amazing. All the things that we're sharing during this week, all the ideas that we are getting about things that we can do. That's amazing. That's the value. >> It's huge value. And that's that sort of flywheel of the community and the power and the insights. Last question for you. If you talk to peers, or when you talk to peers who are maybe starting their procurement digitization journey, what advice do you give them? >> Don't take a no as an answer. Make it happen. Own it. Own it. I think you need to have a vision. You need to put in strategy in place. You need to build a business case. You need to earn your seat at the table at the C-suite. But you need to own it. You cannot let the IT, function, finance community too long, and decide how you want to operate and how you want to move your function as procurement, or build how you operate. You need to own it, and you need to build a business case and you need to make it happen. You need to, yeah. To struggle with that. But if you are a hustler, as we are in cases, we are disruptors. And if you don't disrupt, it's not going to happen. >> I completely agree. Own it, make it happen. Jaime, great to have you on the program. >> Jaime: Thanks so much. >> Thanks for hearing what Casey's is doing, how you're really leading the charge, and how you owned it and made it happen. That's awesome. >> Thank you, Lisa. Thank you for being here. >> Thanks. For Jaime Robles, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE's coverage day two, Coupa Inspire 22, from Las Vegas. Join me with my next guest, coming up shortly. (lighthearted upbeat music)

>>Welcome back to the cosmopolitan in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here at Coupa inspire 2022 with a couple thousand people here. And I got to tell you it's really great to be back in person, done a wheelchair. Join three next, the SVP of product strategy and innovation at Cooper. Donna, welcome to the program. >>Thank you so much. It is great to be here and it's great to be live, but yet >>It is great to be alive. Again. I feel like I'm exhaling for the first time in a long time. >>I know, right. It's just so wonderful. I want >>To talk a little bit about you you've been a Cooper for a long time since it was just a baby startup, a little >>Baby >>Lady that also had a lot of leadership roles, product strategy, marketing, a customer experience, professional services. I also read that you have 12 software patent. I do. I love that. >>I know it's been one of the most amazing things that Coupa, which is this ability to be creative and innovate and then get your item patented. It's wonderful. >>Talk to me about, obviously the last two years have been so interesting, shall we say dynamic challenging? And we were talking before we went live that we haven't. The key bus had been that Coupa inspire, inspire hasn't happened since 2019 and it's almost three years ago. Talk to me about the last 10 years I Cooper and the massive acceleration I'm Rob was saying this morning in the keynote 3.3 trillion under spend under management almost at a trillion a year run rate. Yeah, >>We have huge. The numbers have just started to really become a fly wheel, right? More customers more spend. And really now having this big data repository of $3.3 trillion and the ability to apply AI to that data. But it really has been a journey. Um, when I joined about 11 years ago, now we had this vision, the vision was always a data centric model where we can apply AI to that data and create intelligence. And now we're finally at a volume of data where we can, we can anonymize the data and we can create insights at a level that we just were not able to do 10 years ago. >>One of the things that we've learned, I think fairly recently is that every company has to be a data company regardless of industry. Even I, I, I think about that, like my grocery store has to be a data company. Sure. There's no more, it'd be nice. If we had a data strategy, it would be nice if we actually could glean insights from our data that's table stakes, that's business critical that's differentiating. >>Absolutely. And I think, you know, I think what's really interesting in an enterprise software is that as a SAS provider, although we may host the systems, we don't actually own our customer's data. We need to actually have permission to usage of the data. And that was one of the things that Cooper did very early on, about 10 years ago, where we started working with our customers and really building that permission to use into the contracts themselves. And that has really created now this motion of having data that we can now consume and use where a lot of businesses in enterprise software had not really thought about the notion of permission to use and having data available to them. >>That's the power of the community, right? And that's one of the things that clearly sets Cooper apart from its competition. >>Yes, indeed. We have spent so many years on creating this model of how does the community and how does community.ai help each individual customer become more efficient, save more and also do good for the planet in a way that has just never been able to do, if that company was doing it alone by themselves. >>Speaking of good for the planet, let's talk about ESG, your customer conversations. ESG is broad. >>How >>Are customers approaching the topic of it to bring it in as a strategic initiative? Okay. >>You know, I think this is a really great question. So what happened about a few years ago is our customers sat down with us and we said to ourselves, if we were going to make every dollar more sustainable, more inclusive that we're spending, what would we need to do? What would that be? The places within a spend function that you could improve the outcome of that dollar to be more sustainable and inclusive. And we broke it down into so many different features. And over the last three years, we've developed, delivered over 80 different features now available in our BSM sustainable BSM toolkit that our customers can configure Coupa to impact their ESG goals positively. >>So BSM can be a facilitator of ESG or an accelerator, or >>It's definitely an accelerator. And one of the things we're trying to do is democratize the ability to do good, right? So oftentimes the larger organizations are able to invest people into these problems. Well now smaller and smaller organizations are expected to comply with government regulations. How do these businesses do it? They can do it with technology like Kupa. >>Got it. Okay. One of the things I was looking at in my prep for the event was a recent survey that Cooper did just in February. It's just a couple of months ago, 800 decision makers, >>Um, >>Who have overview or responsibility for the supply chain and businesses with over a thousand employees. And this was global. What are some of the improvements that businesses, what did you find that they want to make with respect to ESG? >>You know, I think there was a really great survey that showed businesses, have the intent they want to do good, but the problem is the act secretion of it. How do they actually make it happen? And technology systems have largely failed them or have only looked at a part of the problem without looking at the whole problem. I can give you an example, please >>Do >>So in the scope three emissions, which is on everyone's mind right now, how are we going to comply with scope three emissions? At first on the surface, it looks like a reporting problem. Oh, I'll just create a report. But the real problem is data related the data itself that these organizations have on what they purchased and who they purchased it from is terrible. And so if your data's bad, your report to the government is going to be terrible, right? So you have to look at the problem holistically solving the data problem before you get to the reporting problem. And that's what Coupa really specializes on. >>And the things I was also looking at in the survey was from an overall theme perspective that the availability and reliability of crucial supply chain data is preventing organizations from operationalizing, their corporate purpose with respect to ESG will Kupa solves that problem. >>Absolutely. >>Talk to me about that. >>Yeah. So let's talk about things like third-party risk management. When you are working in a supply chain, you need to know who your suppliers are, not just your suppliers, but their suppliers as well, tier two, tier three, tier four, or even beyond even. Um, and this is everything from anti-bribery and anti-corruption to InfoSec and GDPR and so many different government regulations on knowing who you're doing business with. And Coupa solves that problem of collecting that data from your third parties and then continually monitoring it and passing it into the different systems within your spend processes in order to make sure that the person that is making a decision, how's the data at their fingertips. >>That's critical. And you know, one of the things we've learned in the last two years is that everybody wants things now, instantaneously in real time, it's no longer, oh, that's great to have that. No, I, as a consumer, I want that in business. I want that every company has to be a data company, but if organizations can't be able to extract insights from that data and make smart decisions on it in real time, they're going to be out of business. >>Absolutely. The ability to be able to process data at the time you're making a decision, the best data possible at that moment is critical in order for these companies, really, it's a, it's an ability for this company to thrive and even survive. >>Absolutely. Nobody's going to want one thing, I think we know nobody's going to want less data slot more slowly as time goes on. It's always going to be more data faster, faster, fastest. >>Absolutely. And that's why this model at Kupa has really been formulated over the last 12 years of how do we collect the data across our customer community? How do we pull it together, normalize it, aggregate it, anonymize it, and create insights that are so powerful. Like what we're just announcing now is our ocean freight pricing >>Index. >>So we've collected all of the data from our customers that are sourcing ocean freight and we're taking that data and we're creating a market index for the pricing of ocean freight. So now within Coupa, you can actually see what's happening the price of ocean freight, and we're going to continue to add more and more services. As more data gets processed to Hooper. >>Talk to me about the customer influence and your role. You talk with customers a lot. It used to be on the road a lot. Obviously that's changed. Hopefully that's coming back, but let's talk about one of the things I always know when I, when I come to inspire, I always know I'm going to see a lot of customer logos. I'm going to feel a lot. And on the cube here from the voice of Coupa's customer, talk to me about some of the influence that your customers have been able to have in the last two years alone. >>Absolutely. So our philosophy at Coupa's, uh, none of us is as smart as all of us. And it really is the DNA of this company, the heart of the company. So when the pandemic hit, we just really said to ourselves, okay, how do we continue that collaboration and now a digital world? And that's what we did. We just pivoted really fast into a digital world, but the same volume, the same collaboration, the same conversations were happening with our customer community. And in the last year alone, we probably had over 400 customers over 90% of the features we delivered had customer input into those features. And the model continues around our customers, collaborating with us via the digital channels and our product owners, really working with them as a co innovation team. And not as, you know, product in a ivory tower somewhere. >>I like the co-innovation kind of team part, but it's really what you're describing is that flywheel that you mentioned a few minutes ago, that's really always been there at Coupa for very, very long time. And it's just getting faster and more efficient. And I would say in a nerdy way more, data-driven >>More data, data, data. I will talk data all day long. It's just wonderful. And even this ocean freight thing, I'll tell everyone 10 years ago, this was the dream to have enough data, to be able to create these types of supply chain insights that are just unparalleled. And now as the data continues to increase the next year's insights and the year after are going to just keep improving because as the data increases, the insights get better and in different categories, different ways. >>So when you're in those customer conversations with customers who maybe prospects, I'll say who aren't yet Coupa customers who ha who say Donna, I've got a, we've got a huge data problem. Where do they start? How do you advise them to be able to overcome that? So they can use the data, glean the insights in real time and be competitive? >>You know, the first thing I always say to our customers or prospective customers is start the journey and have conversations with Coupa as a partner and not as a vendor, the more that we can work together and say, help us understand your technology architecture, help us understand your pain points. Where are the, where are the parts of your business that are critically damaged that need us to prioritize. And then let us have a discussion for you as a company that we can make recommendations you based on other customers that have been like you and have those same pain points and then lay it out from that point of view. But it's, it's hard when it's a very, you know, classic old model of we're procurement and you're a vendor and we're going to silo it because what we see is a >>Lot of, >>Well, this is how we used to do it. So we're only asking you questions around how we used to do it. And now how the rest of the, not about how the rest of the community is doing it. So my advice would really be open up the doors, have a conversation, start as a partner, and then let's figure it out from there. >>Well, one of the things that came across in Rob keynote this morning was about Cooper, about we've got to get rid of the silos. Every organization in every industry cannot operate in a silo. And even, even Barbara Corcoran's keynote when she was talking about some of the best ideas. In fact, I think I saw a tweet from her the other day that said she doesn't think she's ever had a really great idea. They've always come from basically collaborating within a group. So not in a silo. >>Absolutely collaboration is key in everything we do. We, none of us is as smart as all of us. And it truly is a key point in technology. These silos that are happening in business that prevents the risk from properly be operationalized. So for example, the risk team may be aware that there is a supplier that has now gone onto a government watch list. Okay? But the payments team is not aware. So the payments team is still issuing payments to that vendor or new orders are going to that vendor or sourcing events. Coupa brings those silos together and says, instead, we're going to employ what we call suite synergy. And we're going to stop the transactions when the risk is increased, routed to the risk team for review before the money goes out the door. >>And how does I love sweet synergy? How does that resonate? Who are you talking to within customers? Are you talking to the C-suite? How does suite synergy resonate that far up the stack? Because the concept is clear. >>Yeah. It's about the collaboration for more value and protecting the brand. The, what the people we speak to are generally the CFO, the CPO, the chief procurement officer and the CIO. Those are generally, um, who we speak to. But increasingly we see the chief sustainability officer, the chief diversity officer, and especially from a notion of how do I not just report on my data? How do I improve it? How do I impact diversity by helping the person, making a spend decisions, giving them diverse options at the time they're doing that spend decision, instead of just reporting on it, throw it, >>Grow it, act on it, take the insights and actually make smart decisions faster. >>Absolutely. And before the money goes out the door, once the money goes out the door, you cannot influence it to be going to a diverse supplier it's already done. >>Right. So I know we're only on day one here. Last question for you is what are its great turnout? All the people behind us. It's great to hear that buzz of, of a conference environment. Once again, what are some of the things that you've heard today that really excite you about the direction that Cooper's going in? >>I think for me, it all started today. And yesterday, yesterday we are a community advisory boards. We had hundreds of customers that were meeting with us and it was just the sense of co-innovation being alive and well. So many customers today, I sat next to ADM, uh, one of our customers and they're working with us on supply chain collaboration and the next generation of supply chain collaboration. And it was just so wonderful to finally meet the people that we've been working with for so long in a digital world. >>That's right. It's always nice. When you look at badges, I know you put video conferencing for two years. You're >>Taller than I thought >>Exactly. I don't get that. I don't get that. You're taller than other >>Taller. No, I'm pretty >>Sure it's been great. Having you on the program, talking about the strategy, the innovation, the direction coop is going and what you've witnessed, the evolution of it in the last 10 years, we congratulate you on your success. And we just look forward to seeing Kupa, continue to evolve and mature. >>Thank you so much. It was wonderful to sit down with you today. Excellent. >>Good. I enjoyed it too. For Donna wheelchairs. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of Cooper inspire 22 from Las Vegas. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From London, England, it's theCUBE, covering Coupa Inspire '19 EMEA, brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE! Lisa Martin on the ground in London at Coupa Inspire. Because I'm in the UK, I have to say, you know of Sting, right? Well, guess who's here? Somebody cool enough to go by one name, it's Chandar, the CMO at Coupa. Welcome back! >> Great, Lisa, it's great to be here. >> So, this morning kicked off with Rob's talk all about community. One of the interesting things about Coupa is this community that you guys have built. Talk to me about, I know $1.3 trillion of spend is going through the Coupa platform, the community. Talk to me about how you've cultivated this community at Coupa. >> Yeah, it's a great question. Now, if you take a step back, you know, people don't buy features, people buy tribal feelings. And if you think it, if you look at, like, you know, if you look at a product like Harley-Davidson. Anybody can go buy any bike, but people are not buying the features, they're buying the tribal feeling of being part of that community. If you look at a product like Peloton, you know, people can go buy, have any stationary bike or any workout bike today. But they want to be part of that community. And as my wife tells me, Sephora, right? I don't have a lot of experience with that-- >> She's right. >> She is right, great, (Lisa laughs) thanks for the endorsement there. But again, it is about being part of the community and people like that and stuff, and that's what we're doing is, it's the features or the capability, it's the community the tribal feeling, and that's what Rob was talking about, the inspirational attributes of these different people that are part of this community, and how we're trying to, how we are building this community by showcasing the great leaders and their attributes and how they're transforming change in their organizations, and that's what we're creating in this conference, the feeling, the #emotion, of I want to be part of this cool club, and that's what we're doing. >> You know, a lot of companies talk about customer first, customer centricity. The community here is really helping Coupa innovate on its own technology. Talk to me about some of the things that, you know, since we last spoke, a few months ago, that have been inspired by the voice of the community. >> Yeah, so, you know, there is this concept of co-creation that Rob talked about today with our community. And a lot of the community is inspired by the community and it's for the community. And we have a number of innovations, 80 plus innovations that have been inspired in the last one year by the community. And even a concept like Source Together that Rob talked about, and the idea of Source Together is how can we come together as one community and drive the best negotiated savings together with a supplier, this is an idea that's been co-created with the community. So there's a number of different things. You look at community intelligence, Rob talked about commodity insights, as well as a number of other capabilities that we are showcasing today, has been driven, co-created, inspired by the community. And that's what's great. You want to set the innovation agenda for the industry by having this community inspire us. In fact we had our customer advisory board at every conference that is happening for us, and that's what drives to a lot of the innovation that we do today. >> Speaking of customers, Rob shared a lot of examples during his keynote this morning. I lost count of how many of your Coupa Spendsetters were mentioned, other customers, all with very strong business, measurable business outcomes. I know tomorrow in your keynote, you're going to be talking with a number of customers. But some of the things that are interesting about what Rob shared is these are examples that aren't just about refining procurement and reducing spend and, it's much more transformative. Give me some of your favorite examples of where this is beyond improving procurement. >> Yeah, it's a great question. It's a great question. And we have a number of stories, for example, tomorrow in my keynote, I'm going to be talking about storytelling, right. I'm going to be talking about how we can inspire the community through storytelling, and great storytelling starts with great storytellers. And these Spendsetters, and we can see them in the hallways here, we have found about 15 of them, and they're all great storytellers for one reason. They have great transformative stories in business spend management, but what makes them a great storyteller is that they're telling a story beyond the boundaries of the business spend management. Let me give a couple of examples, right. So one story that I'll highlight tomorrow is about Jarkko, the CPO of Telia. Now, I don't know if we know Telia, but 60% of the word's internet traffic goes through Telia. >> 60%? >> 60%. So everyday morning, checking out coupa.com that we all do. >> Every day. >> Or I'm looking at some less popular sites like Facebook or LinkedIn or anything else, you're probably on the Telia network, especially in this part of the world. And their challenge, their business spend management challenge is, they're pretty fragmented across the Nordics and the Baltics and other regions, and now with Jarkko, he's a strategic crusader, not a hired gun, but more of a driven crusader who's come in, transformed the sourcing function, made it more strategic, consolidated seven systems into one system with Coupa, and had 20,000 employees using that as well as all the different people for sourcing, so that they get the global benefits of scale across the regions. Now that's a great business spend management story, but what makes him a great storyteller, he's telling a story beyond the boundaries of business spend management, because he's not talking about savings attainability, he's talking about environmental sustainability, and the story he talks about is what their initiative at a board level is, you know, zero emission and zero waste by 2030, and how the work that his team is doing is directly impacting that board level initiative on how are they driving a communication strategy across the supplier base to get their environmental plans into the Telia's operations, and how me measures plans and progress of every supplier in their CO2 emission, and how that's going to be an explicit part of how they work with their suppliers, and how he is the trusted advisor that he is actually challenging everybody to rethink this whole idea of source to pay. That is telling a boundary beyond the boundaries of business spend management, it's telling a story. So that's one example, right. >> Is that a gentleman who's in procurement in finance within an organization? >> He is the CPO, the procurement-- >> That is having an impact on the sustainability footprint of the company. >> That's right, so directly associating with the initiative at a board level, right. So he's shifted it, by shifting the storytelling from talking about savings attainability to environmental sustainability, he shifted the perception of the organization from something that's operational to something that's very strategic in the organization. So that's one good storytelling. The other one I'll highlight, an example, is Matthieu at Global Fund. Now the Global Fund is the world's largest financier of fighting malaria, AIDS, HIV in 100-plus countries. They disperse $4 billion every year for that. And they have this partner called OneWorld.org, it's powered by Coupa, that Matthieu and his team are doing. So he could get a great business spend management story. He can say, you know, I've driven digital transformation, I've done 99.9% of my POs are electronic, and I've come to this new age of where, you know, on contract spend is being done, et cetera. Now what makes him a great storyteller, he's telling the story beyond the boundaries of BSM again. He's talking about a story of how this, the work that his team is doing, is directly impacting saving 32 million lives. How they are treating millions of people, get the right treatment for HIV, help pregnant mothers or on HIV, they get the right treatment on time, so that the babies don't get infected with HIV, and how they're distributing hundreds of millions of mosquito nets throughout the world for preventing malaria, through this OneWorld tool that's powered by Coupa to get the right medication on time. So that's millions and millions of lives, but the speed and ease of every single medication to get there, has an impact on the life of that person, and that's the story he's telling. >> This is so interesting, because it's so common for businesses to tell the common success story, and a lot of what Coupa shares of customers holding those big white cards with big numbers of what they're saving are very impactful. What was the idea behind the Spendsetters program, 'cause when I was reading a few of them in preparation to come here, it seems like it was a little bit more about the person and how that individual has facilitated transformation. Tell me about the concept-- >> It's a great point. There's two components to it, right. One is empirical, two is emotive. And if you look at both concepts, one of them is the empirical value that, yes, ultimately Coupa is about driving value, and that has to be as a company, has a capability of driving value to our customers. And that's the empirical value of you have driven so much saving, so much percentage of spend, and you know, millions of dollars, billions of dollars savings et cetera. Procter & Gamble, for example, $2.5 billion in savings. That's the empirical value. It's very clear, that's the value. But behind that is a person, and that is the emotive story of what is that person, what is the personal story, what have they gone through in their life, what's their, you know, nurture and nature, and how that's influenced them that's becoming, that made them into the great leader today, and that's the emotive stories we're trying to also tell on the Spendsetters site. So there's the value side of the story, and then there is the emotive side of the story, and the spendsetters.com is purely on telling the human stories, because behind every purchase order is a person, and we're telling the story of that person. >> So as we look at the changing role of the Chief Procurement Officer, the changing role of finance decision makers, not just here in the UK, and I know Coupa recently did a study that showed that 96% of UK financial decision makers said, "Hey, I don't have complete visibility over all my spend", so big opportunity there, but even from a transformation perspective, the Spendsetters examples, how is that showing that Coupa can fundamentally help a business not just change procurement, but have such wide lasting impacts? >> Yeah, I think ultimately, if you look at procurement, you know, for it to go as going from operation to strategic, you're just getting that seat at the table. And getting that seat at the table in any executive discussion is about first aligning to some strategic initiative that is important at that executive table. So more as we align these value stories and the value that procurement is driving, through these strategic initiatives that are important at the board level, at the executive level, the more the profile and the more the R-E-S-P-E-C-T, as we like to say, and get that seat at the table, and that's what this whole Spendsetters program is aiming to do is A, showcase the personal heroes, and B, showcase how they're telling stories that align to bigger level initiatives, that's getting them get that elevate their position and get that seat at the table. And that's what the plan is there. >> So, lots of growth. Second quarter results, I was taking a look at those, revenues up, billings are up, very high renewal rates. So from a customer satisfaction perspective, the data is there to show that Coupa is going in the right direction. From your perspective, how influential are your existing, your incumbent customers in helping prospective customers evaluate Coupa and go, this is the right decision for us. >> It's a great question. You know, I say we live in a peer-bound world, right, where it's really, we more and more, first of all, 80 to 90% of buyers' journeys are self directed, because buyers have more power than ever before, and second of all, anything we do within our personal lives as well as in business decisions, we rely more on peers and people we trust to help us make those decisions, right? From that perspective, our best sellers, the best sellers we have in this conference, are our customers. I just came from an executive luncheon, where we had 50% of the room was customers and 50% of the room was prospects, and we had our best sellers, not our salespeople, our customers talking to the prospects, in real, authentic conversations of what's value, what's their journey, what did they struggle with, and what are the lessons learned, and how did they get there. And those are really meaningful interactions that ultimately is going to make a prospect, influence a prospect on what decision they have to make. >> Absolutely. >> So that's very, very important from us, and then providing a platform for this authentic dialog and these authentic interactions. That's important for us. And also, I think, you know, ultimately in a SaaS business, the true measurement of success, I say is two things, right. One is what I call lifetime value, and two is the number of brand advocates. So the idea there if someone is staying with you longer and giving you lifetime value, and is shouting from the rooftop that I really love my interaction with this brand, then invariably you're driving value to them in a long term way. And that's really the true measure of success, and that's what excites us from our perspective. >> And is the foundation of that trust? >> The foundation of that is two things. It's trust based on value, right, and you've got to deliver value, and Rob has a great line where he talks about, it is not about customer satisfaction, it's about customer success. 'Cause many times a customer may be satisfied, may not really know what their success metrics really mean, but it's not about sometimes a customer may not be satisfied, but really be successful because you're driving the true metrics what is important to the customer. So once you get the value delivered, and do it in an open, authentic way, then, in that case, there's trust that build, and based on that trust, you earned that trust, and that becomes the foundation of the lifetime value. >> We were talking about, well, we, Rachel Botsman was talking about the importance of a brand, any brand, earning trust. A lot of times she gave that example in her keynote where she showed three brand logos, Uber, Facebook, and Amazon, and said, trust is so contextual and so subjective, but clap for which brand you trust the most. And it's so interesting when she started talking about, Facebook got the least, in fact Facebook got no applause at all, I was expecting a few folks (Chandar laughs) to maybe do some clapping, but Amazon being the clear winner, and I thought, yeah, I trust Amazon to deliver whatever it is that I buy when they say they're going to deliver it, and she said she trusts them to do the same, but, would you trust them to pay their taxes on time-- >> Chandar: Sure. >> So when she started talking about trust being subjective and contextual, it really kind of changes the whole dynamic. >> Chandar: It does. >> So that earned trust, but also the ability to reduce the risk that your customers are facing, whether it's overpaying suppliers or paying duplicate invoices, that trust risk balance seems pretty critical as well. >> Ti does, it does. It's an interesting perspective. I think because, in that case of Amazon, I think there's operational trust, that they're going to get the job done and deliver the whatever you ordered in one day with frame or two days with frames, this is operational trust. But is there a trust in the sense of purpose is where she was going with, right. And today for organizations, especially with the millennial crowd, as being customers as well as employees, the question is, you can get operational trust, but you also have a sense of purpose that they trust in, and have that be, and be authentic as an organization. And that's why is say it is not being, you talk about AI, as artificial intelligence, the real AI is authentic interactions. >> Lisa: Authentic interactions. >> And that's really the authenticity as a brand, being open, and acknowledge your failures but strive for excellence for success, and have this open platform with your customers, and always look towards adding value. I think that invariably, over time, creates this trust feeling that ultimately drives long term lifetime value for us. So that I think is the most important thing. >> Absolutely. So tell me again, which three customers are going to be on stage with you tomorrow sharing their stories? >> It's great, I have three. One, Procter & Gamble, a company that my mom knows about, my 86-year-old mom. So one of the greatest brands, so that's a great story about, again, they have a great business spend management story, but they're telling a story beyond the boundaries of business spend management and it's a fun story. And then we're going to have the Global Fund. Again, I told you, one of the world's largest financier of fighting HIV, malaria and AIDS. And we're going to have Telia, one of the largest telecommunications providers. >> Excellent. So really kind of showing the breadth of the technologies and the industries that Coupa helps to transform. >> And the breadth of the personalities, and the people behind that are driving all this change. >> Excellent, well Chandar, thank you for joining me on theCUBE. I wish we were going to be here tomorrow to see your keynote, but it sounds exciting and the Spendsetter program is certainly one that I think is quite differentiated in terms of telling those transformative stories that you said are both empirical and emotional. >> Yes, thank you Lisa, it's great to be here. >> Likewise. >> Great. >> For Chandar, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Coupa Inspire London. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas Nevada, it's the CUBE. Covering Coupa Inspire 2019. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Welcome to the CUBE from Coupa Inspire'19 at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas. It's a pretty swanky place here. Very excited to welcome to the CUBE for the first time from Accenture, Jesse Hanger, Director of Capability Network Sourcing and Procurement. Jesse, welcome. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> Oh, our pleasure to have you. So here we are day two of the main stuff going on here. All talking about Business Spend Management, BSM, this new category that Coupa is defining. We had the chance yesterday to speak with Rob Bernshteyn their CEO. Ravi Thakur was there. And it's one of the cool things that Coupa is doing is it's now, it's procurement, it's invoicing, it's expenses, it's payments, but it's also helping to redefine procurement and finance. >> And it is. I mean it's a huge shift when we think about, in industry, the same shift that Salesforce had years ago when it comes to CRM. When Coupa started talking about this, maybe two years ago, I had a little bit of a head-scratcher, I saw some of their slides and I thought to myself, that's a bit much to say you're going to change this, but the funny thing was, no one else had come up with a real definition of this. We finally had procurement technology that was at a level that you could capture this type of data and information, and it could go broader than just my MRP system and bills of materials, and to everything. Into your traveling expenses, into how you're sourcing things, into your basic inventory, and so it took me awhile to come around, but it was a slow journey for me, but clearly Business Spend Management is the future, what we look at with procurement. Because for a CPO, it can't just be about saving money or reducing costs, you have to start driving business and you can't drive business if all you do is save money. >> Exactly, and that's been something that I've learned a lot from in the last a week or so, alone, is how influential a CPO can be. This person can be, not just the money saver, it's shareholder value. >> Jesse: Right, bottom line growth of the business. >> Yes, and one of the things that I really appreciate is Coupa's done a great job the last two days of sharing the voice of the customer. Because I said to you, before we went live, I said, I don't as a marketer, I'm a little bias, but I don't think there's anything that's more brand validating than the voice of a successful customer that actually shows measurable business outcomes and they showed that this morning. That transcends any industry whether you're manufacturing or a retailer. >> Yep, and so when you do think about it from their customer's perspective, from our client's perspective at Accenture, this is not easy. Changing the way you do things and changing your overall procurement operating model it's not a easy stuff. There's a reason why there're so many big companies like Accenture that do this kind of work. Because it's hard and it's needed. We come in with a different perspective. Having a platform like Coupa to really initiate that transformation, to be the to be the lever that moves the company from where they were to where they want to be and where they need to be to be competitive in the market, it makes our job so much easier across the broader supply chain practice to really, not just make the change, but you know we use a big consulting word, to instantiate it, so that it stays. We don't make it better this year, we make it better moving forward. >> It's an evolution. >> Jesse: It is. >> But that requires the right mindsets to go from a tactical role, of managing budgets and things, to being strategic, being able to identify fraud detection, for example. >> Well and again, when they talk about their suite synergy and the fact that all of these components of the platform, they're not separate modules, they hate when we say modules, so it's the T&E module. All of these components because they are all natively integrated and the data structure is the same on the back end, things like the fraud detection become easy. for Coupa, not in other platforms. Again, the more things you are doing with Coupa, the more data you have and the more you can get the benefit from the broader ecosystem, from the over 1 trillion dollars in spend that's gone through, that's fully classified, coded, detailed, now all of that spend helps that fraud engine do a better job. >> The community that you mentioned they were saying, I think Rob Bernshteyn CEO Coupa said yesterday that since 2016, around the time they went public, it's been a 5X increase in the amount of spend being managed through the Coupa platform. Accenture has over 50 deployments of Coupa in 72 countries, you guys are also managing over 100 billion of that, but this community that they described yesterday, so eloquently, is very collaborative, allowing not just customers to leverage from peer's best practices, but suppliers, as well. Talk to us about some of the things, like the wave that they're riding now, in terms of this community intelligence, and how is it going to help Accenture really be able to help more companies get that visibility and that control of all their spend? >> So as an example, at Accenture when you look at the analyst reports, we do very well when it comes to our procurement practice and the spend that we're helping companies manage outside of a platform. So we've got I think the latest number I saw was like 1.8 trillion dollars that we have helped companies source in the last handful of years. >> Wow. So that is something that gives us a huge competitive advantage. The same thing is true of Coupa and you said, how they're riding this wave, honestly, I don't think they're riding the wave yet, I think the wave is still building and they're about to start riding it, I think that what we're going to see over the next one to four years is going to be a fairly significant shift in how that data is going to drive very discrete and concrete value to all the members of the community. >> Wow, that is exciting. One of the things that we talk about in terms of changes to the CPO's role and CFO are these ways of disruption. One of them is consumerization. And you know I think Raja talked about that this morning, it was talked about a number of times yesterday, we spoke about it on the program, we're consumers all the time. Whether we're getting up in the morning at a conference and going to buy a coffee at Starbucks, or something that we want to order from a vendor like an Amazon, we have this expectation that we can get it, or if you want to buy a car, we have all of this data that we've never had before, so empowered, but then we go to our work lives, and if we're in whatever role we're in, maybe I'm in marketing and I need to do a trip, so I've got to go and do it, travel expense, we want the same ease of consumerization. Your thoughts on Coupa Pay, the expansion of Coupa with open buying the AWS Marketplace, on bringing that consumerization in, do you think like, (hand clapping) yes, that's exactly what we need? >> The first place of bringing in the consumerization was really how Coupa was engineered, years ago. When we go back to before they had released numbers and it was fall of 2007, they had numbers like that, Coupa really did give you an experience that was like Amazon. It was, we used to say, we're going to bring your shopping experience from Sunday afternoon to your desk Monday morning. And as that happened, now you start to see a different piece and that is a greater uptake in terms of the usage of procurement platforms. So instead of people, it's easier to pick up the phone and call Bill over at my supplier and say I need a case of whatever, it's actually easier to do it in the platform, and I can still give Bill a call and go have a beer with him if I want to maintain the relationship, but I don't have to make every one of my transactions start with a phone call that necessitates three additional phone calls later on to check on the status. Instead, I can do it in the platform very quickly. When you expand that out to what now Coupa Pay is going to offer, especially when we look at our clients that have challenges with multiple financial systems, multiple banks that are processing their payments, as you shift it away from that multiple outlet situation and you can move it large, if not all of that, into Coupa Pay, you're streamlining things for dozens if not scores of people in your company and making it better for them. >> Some of the stats I saw on the press release about the amount of payment processes that are still manual, and still 40% of it by paper check? >> I've got one client that writes 40,000 paper checks a year. >> How receptive are they to digital transformation? >> They almost think it's too good to be true. When you when you talk to clients like that, Fortune 500 companies, and when we talk to clients like that and you tell them, what you heard from Coupa is true, they're not just selling you, or trying to sell you something, they're telling you how it really works for clients and we've seen it. I look at the last dozen or so clients I've worked with, last year and a half I was doing some analysis, 51 billion dollars, 50.8 billion dollars in revenues is the average for those clients. So big companies. >> Big, yes. Really big companies. And as we look at those, you'd be surprised at how many of them have challenges with a lot of manual processes, still. They're the top of their field but they still have those challenges. So bringing this to them as they are deploying Coupa and seeing what they can realize in terms of efficiencies, it actually makes my job really fun because everybody's going to be happy. >> That is a win-win. One of the things Rob said yesterday, I know a little bit about Rob, and some of his proudest moments are hearing clients articulate success and he goes, one of my favorite things that's going into, whether it's a 50 billion dollar a year company or not, where there's someone maybe in the C-suite that just is skeptical, and he goes, and that just takes one champion who sees this vision, to convert that person to, oh my gosh, we can have this crystal ball of visibility of everything, and really leverage that to drive digital transformation so that the business is faster to identify new products, new revenues, convert customers faster, increase customer lifetime value and, and, and, the impact there is exponential. >> Well and that's one of the reasons why I think our partnership with Coupa is so rich, is because Accenture is more a technology company. We're not just focused on accounting, we're not just focused on finance, we have a lot of technology resources. We usually have a lot of connection into the CIO and the IT suite of leadership. They're the ones that are typically the most skeptical. They've been through dozens of roll outs of different things and they've seen them go anywhere from 0% to 50% effective. So because we've got the relationships there and we can have these conversations with the CIO, and say, this is different. This is going to be a very different kind of program for you and we're coming in and telling you that we can work this together as your partner and be successful, and again, you get six months into it and the lights fully on at that point and they're on board. In fact next year we're looking forward to bringing one or two CIOs on stage with us at Inspire'20 to talk about it from an IT perspective. >> Awesome, well I look forward to hearing that. Jesse, thank you so much for joining me on the Cube this afternoon. Exciting stuff. Control, visibility, who doesn't want that? >> Exactly, it's good times. >> Excellent, thanks Jesse, appreciate it. >> Thank you, appreciate being here. >> For Jesse Hanger, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from Coupa Inspire'19. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Woman: From the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. It's the Cube. Covering Coupa Inspire 2019. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey you, welcome to the Cube. Lisa Martin coming to you from Las Vegas Coupa Inspire '19. I'm excited to be welcoming to the Cube for the first time, Ravi Thakur. The SVP of Business Acceleration from Coupa. Ravi welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you Lisa. Appreciate it. So day one, everybody had started the day off. The general session was lots of information from Rob. We heard from Malcolm Gladwell. One of my favorite storytellers. If I could master telling a story the way he does that would be awesome. We've also heard from some customers today. We had the Lululemon staples, KPMG, Deloitte. People are excited about the innovations and how Coupa is really helping to transform the CPO, the CFO and help these guys and girls become much more strategic. >> Ravi: Right >> Lots of change and lots of forcing functions too like consumerization and pricing pressures and and all these things. But something that you guys announced back in, I believe November 2018. Just about six months ago, was Coupa Pay. Talk to us a little bit about Coupa Pay in the spirit of this events theme of Spend Smarter. Together. What is Coupa Pay? What were some of the gaps in the market that you guys saw? And thought we can help B2B customers uncripple themselves. >> Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for those questions Lisa. I've been with Coupa for over 12 years now and throughout that time I've have had thousands of conversations with Spend management professionals across all different topics. But whenever payments would come up there's always a sense of it's kind of a nightmare, it's a mess for us let's not talk about that. (laughing) And what we've seen is that. A lot of large companies have multiple ERP systems and when you have multiple ERP systems trying to get a hold of the data and be able to control the funds going out can be a little bit of a challenge. Then when you start mixing in that there's so many different ways to pay suppliers. Weather it's a credit card or a digital cheque or cross-border payment. Whatever it may be. It becomes a big conglomeration of a big nightmare. And so when we started looking at payments. We wanted to figure out well, how can we simplify this experience for our customers? Because we already have best in class procurement best in class AP automation. Adding payments was kind of an easy decision. >> Lisa: Natural evolution. >> A natural evolution of how we were progressing or kind of move into business spend manager categorization of Business Spend Management. And so when we started the journey we made the decision maybe about 18 months ago to actually start getting into this a little bit. And we started off as you mentioned last November with announcing virtual cards on purchase orders. We've started adding other things like early pay discounts. Which are kind of a financing type of solution and just yesterday, actually just today Rob announced general availability for invoice payments. Which is really the workhorse of payments. It's taking all of your invoices that you have as a company and how do you pay your different suppliers. >> Lisa: I can imagine a company would have multiple banks that they're dealing with to pay different suppliers different suppliers, probably had different preferences and then what's the percentage of invoices that are being paid by cheque by paper cheque still. >> Ravi: Yeah, I mean in the U.S. I think I had a statistic from 2016. It's a couple of years dated but it said 51% of payments in the U.S. is still via cheque. It's crazy. And I had a meeting earlier today with a pretty large customer. And they're telling me about how their treasury the woman that runs treasury for them. She walks around with the key fob of 12 different key fobs, for two-factor authentication to log in to 12 different banks, all over the world. And a lot of that is very painful it opens themselves up to a lot of inefficiencies to risk, to potential fraud and with the payment solutions that we're offering that we're actually now generally available with. We're able to solve a lot of those challenges it's really exciting for us. >> Absolutely. And driving up the efficiency of accounts payable by having all of these options. Can imagine from a customer's perspective all of the elements in that business they're going to get tighter going to get more simple and where it's going to really be an enabler of an organization's overall digital business transformation >> Right, it's one of the last areas of transformation we see in Business Spend Management. We've already as mentioned the procurement process AP automation, where we handle expense reporting and now when you're starting to look at payments and doing it at the scale that we're looking at doing. There are a lot of payment solutions out there a lot of payment providers. But none of them have the backing of the procurement process None of them have the rich invoice data that we bring to the table. Let alone the ability for us to send payments due payments domestically, across the globe. Which is a very unique differentiator for us. Along with being able to pay out cross-border payments in hundreds of countries. Now the other thing that we've seen from organizations especially as the the way that the economy and organizations have evolved. You're not just paying a supplier that has ACH information They're not willing to provide you with their bank account information. Might be a five-person flower shop that you need to buy flowers from occasion. It may be temp labour that you have hired for certain projects. Or contingent workforce for certain projects. Or maybe even paying back your employees through expense reports. And so as we've architected our payment solutions we've looked at all of these together and figure it out what are the different optimal ways to do that. As a matter of fact we're announcing a partnership with PayPal. So in order to now send payments via PayPal from a business PayPal account from our customer to the PayPal accounts of their some of their smaller suppliers. So that's a unique way that we're thinking about what are the common use cases scenarios in the consumer world and bringing that into the business environment. >> Yeah, that consumerization effect is so interesting because we're all consumers every day. Weather we're shopping for some beach wear for a backyard barbecue or something on Amazon or whatever happens to be. We have this expectation, culturally we're trained we can find anything. We get anything, we can see all the suppliers and the different prices and select. Read all these reviews. Because we're so conditioned to that in our everyday lives those people that are doing that then have buying decisions and buying roles and their company's expect the same experience. >> Ravi: Right >> And you guys are listening to your customers and enabling that which is huge hugely impactful to every industry, right? Manufacturing, Retail, Health Care you name it. >> Any business that has employees which is every business in the world. It's a great point. I mean just a consumerization of all of these different aspects of business and that's where, when we started Coupa and as we've continued to grow throughout our expansion it's just really listening to our customers listening to the vibrant community that we've created. I met a lot of meetings today and I met with another customer a couple of hours ago and he was super excited about how he's been on our Coupa Community. We have a portal for our customers. They can put in their ideas and talk about and have conversations. He just loves the way that we've been able to react and be able to implement a number of his solutions that have made his life easier along with the broader community of buyers that we have. >> All the marketing material talks about this BSM community that is developing together and that was one of the themes I felt that I heard from Rob this morning during his general session is this. Not only is this community incredibly rich with data 1.2 trillion dollars of spend they are going through this which is a 5X multiplier from I think you should have said this at 2016. But it's also encouraging, suppliers that are in there customers that are in there are able to to learn and save from each other. The collaboration element was really, I thought quite potent and it sounded like quite a differentiator to me. >> Right, absolutely. I think Rob talked about what we're calling prescriptions. >> Yes, 18'000 so far? >> Exactly, and you know the ability to take a look at it's not just $1.2 trillion worth of spend. It's 5 million suppliers. It's not all of them have catalog items but a lot of them do have catalog items. It's looking across millions of purchase order millions of invoices across the system and being able to rationalize and look at data and look at all of these different trends that no one's able to do and really it's just the beginning of the power of what we're doing. We've introduced our business spend index. Which is a leading indicator of how the economy and businesses are operating. We're really just starting to scratch the surface in this area, I mean a thousand customers is great. But as we continue to grow and expand and multiply our customer base. We're going to be able to help things around broader supply chain initiatives. Help things around sustainability. Help organizations figure out are they working with suppliers that are not only suppliers that are risky which we do today. But what about tier two suppliers or tier three suppliers that have a potential risk in their supply chain. And as we start to accumulate lot more data we're able to do things that really no one's ever been able to do, ever. >> Lisa: Thinking back that the 12 years that you have at Coupa and the massive transformation that you've seen in every industry. All of these different disruptors. Like we talked about earlier, all of the changes that are really forcing CPO's and CFO's to become sort of those fraud detectors and those strategic thinkers. Because they can see there this isn't just about buying and sourcing. There is tremendous business potential by having that visibility where all your Spend is in one platform. That's absolutely transformational. >> What do businesses do? They spend money or they sell goods or services and we have half of that equation and we're doing it at a scale that hasn't been seen before. So yeah, the ability for us to over what we've seen over the past 12 years. Not just what's happening at a macro economic level that's a big part of it. But just in general. What's the thinking of the CPO's? What's the thinking of the CFO's? How are they starting to look at things? How are they starting to feel the empathy for their employees. The empathy for their suppliers and making business decisions. And we're now part of that conversation. We're part of that equation as these companies are looking at these things. >> And have you seen the roles of the CPO and the CFO start to change, to start embracing emerging technologies embracing AI and machine learning and understanding how that can really once they have the data and they can apply intelligence and train the machines, how much potential they have. Are they receptive now? >> Ravi: It's just a start. it's just a start. I mean, when I joined Coupa 12 years ago Salesforce is really just starting to get going with the whole SAS thing and it's been a phenomenal change. We had the opportunity of lunch with Malcolm Gladwell today as an executive team and one of the things that we talked about was Silicon Valley and what's happening in general with technology. And he put it very clear, he said we're in the first minute of the technology revolution. It's still super early and how things are moving and transforming in this world We're at the forefront today and we want to continue to be there as the world changes. >> Lisa: So lots of exciting news today you mentioned PayPal. What are some of the other things that are going to be coming out this week that are exciting to you and your customers? >> So a lot of things that are coming out for payments specifically, we're going to be announcing a number of partnerships in the morning. I'll be announcing a number of partnerships on the main stage. We're doing, as mentioned, something with PayPal. We're going to announce that Citibank has joined as a virtual card issuer on the Coupa Pay platform. They're one of the largest global issuers in the world. We're introducing TransferMate as a strategic partner for money movement. And kind of one of the more unique things is when you think about payments and when you think about our community of buyers and suppliers. It's buyers and it's suppliers. And so we want to start spending more time and more focus at least from a payment standpoint on how can we make it easier for suppliers to do business with our customers. We're also going to announce an integration with Stripe. So Stripe is one of the, the bigger Fintechs in the world One of the darling Fintech companies around. And what they're doing is because of their capabilities around the card processing standpoint. Not to get into too much the details but we can now enable a super or a higher level of efficiency for card acceptance for suppliers that hasn't been seen before through our Virtual Card capabilities. So we're really excited about these partnerships and there's a lot more to come over the next several months here. >> To borrow this from Malcolm Gladwell the fact that he thinks we're in the first minute of this technology revolution, is like oh! Shocking. But all I've heard all day today is customer centricity, supplier centricity. Ravi thank you so much, for stopping by the Cube and giving us some of your time on this very exciting day. I know day two will be, probably as action-packed. Tomorrow, but we appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. >> My pleasure >> Appreciate it. For Ravi Thakur, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from Coupa Inspire '19. Thanks for watching (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas Nevada, it's The Cube. Covering Coupa Inspire 2019. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey, welcome to The Cube. Lisa Martin on the ground at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas for Coupa Inspire 19. This is a really exciting two day event. We're going to be here covering, talking all about spending smarter. Very pleased to welcome to The Cube for the first time from KPMG, Dipan Karumsi, procurement advisory practice leader. Dipan, welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you very much, glad to be here, appreciate it. >> So this is an interesting event. Coupa in the last few years since becoming a public company really seems to be on this rocket ship. The momentum that CEO Rob Bernshteyn talked about this morning, there's now 1.2 trillion dollars of spend transactions going through the Coupa platform across companies in every industry from manufacturing to health care to retail. Loads of opportunity for businesses of any type to really get that control and visibility on spend. Talk to us about what KPMG is doing with Coupa. You're both a titanium sponsor here at Inspire 19 as well as a partner but give us a little bit of overview of your partnership with Coupa. >> Absolutely, so we've actually been coming to the conference for seven years now, I think since the very beginning and been the top level sponsor since the very beginning so it's been a fantastic relationship where we've helped a number of the customers that they talked about today, a lot of those customers were ours and we've had the opportunity to kind of get them live on the platform and see success by bringing spend through the platform and getting the visibility of those transactions. So we're fortunate enough we have 100 plus clients, globally, that we've been able to bring live on the Coupa platform across 90 plus countries and so we're really excited to be here. >> So some of the things I was reading about Coupa is that a lot of times, in the beginning, last 10 years or so, companies came to them looking for help with procurement or invoices. Now they're able to help companies get that visibility over all spend across procurement, invoices, expenses, travel management, payments. Talk to us about how you help some of those joint customers to really go from that siloed approach, going all right, we've got a few things under control, to getting that visibility because there is a tremendous amount of business impact that can come from getting that visibility into where all of your spend is coming from and where it's going. >> That's right. So I think in the beginning days as you kind of mentioned right, it was important to get the majority of the spend on the platform and so you looked at your indirect spend categories that are most commonly purchased, you get them onto the platform, you start analyzing that, more effective sourcing, drive value out of those categories. And as you look at the different categories that companies are spending in, they're evolving. More services spend, might be different categories in marketing, digital media, et cetera, and so as Coupa has expanded they've focused on some of the other categories and how to bring them in. So they bought companies that focus on contingent labor and those types of things. And so you start bringing all that spend together and all of a sudden you have a very nice pool of data from which you can analyze and from which you can make better decisions upon. So it's going to be a constant kind of proliferation of the tool and it's going to get broader and I think that's fantastic because organizations can see exactly what they're doing in a lot of different areas. >> Wouldn't it be nice if we all had that visibility in our personal lives as well? Well speaking of your relationship, you mentioned this is your seventh year sponsoring Inspire. Let's talk about how the role of procurement is changing, and the role of finance. Going from more tactical to much more strategic. Thinking about some of the disruptors like consumerization. You know, we're all consumers and we have this, we all have Amazon on our phone right, And we have this expectation that in our personal lives we can get anything at any time with the click of a button. And now when consumers are business buyers we want the same thing. Talk to us about what you have seen at KPMG as that procurement role has changed and what makes your implementation with Coupa unique. >> Yeah, that's exactly right, you put it exactly right there. You know, consumers or your employees internal of the organizations, are looking to buy in the way that they buy at home. They're looking to have visibility into when the shipment is, the products are going to arrive, they want to provide ratings as to what they thought of those products, they want to be able to have visibility into what they spent, and in fact where it's going is they want to be alerted when they should be buying something else. I mean, lot of the spend can actually be predicted as to what's going to be happening. And so think about an application that's going to alert you, it's probably about time that you need toner for this printer, or it's probably about time that you need XYZ to come and do this service for you. And so moving to that as you analyze the spend that's going to the platform is exactly what's happening. And I think it makes lives of employees better, easier, and it makes it a little bit more effective to kind of get spend through the application as well. >> When you're talking with customers, whether it's been a man or a woman who's been a CPO for a long time, where are they in terms of being receptive to having these predictive technologies? Is that a big cultural mind shift within whether it's a large manufacturing company or a smaller health care insurance carrier? >> It is, I mean the reality of it is with the data to be predictive there's a lot of things that have to be evaluated in the back. So you have to have clean supplier data, clean spend data, you have different applications that are integrating and you need end to end visibility in order to have a data set that's long enough and accurate enough to be able to predict from. So it's one thing to say okay we're going to go predictive, but it's another thing to be able to have the data to be able to accurately predict. So I think procurement organizations, kind of back to your other question of where are they going, you know historically procurement hasn't been one of the areas that CFOs are the first ones to jump into. And I think what organizations are realizing and was the C-suite is realizing is, this is the one place in the organization where we can see most of our third party spend. And so procurement has to quickly grasp, okay how can I get a handle on that information to be able to make better decisions and so show value to the organization. So that's how procurement's getting into the game, I think that's how they're going to show their value, by making that data set accurate, and that will lead them to kind of that predictive aspect of it. >> So what are those, what's the conversation like in terms of, all right there's many many sources of data, where we all know, you hear all the time data is the new oil, data is gold. It is if you have the ability to, like you said, make sure it's clean, but also be able to extract valuable insights from it faster than your competition. So from an infrastructure perspective, where does KPMG start with implementations with Coupa, are you first doing assessments with customers to understand all of the different data sources, how best to bring them together so that the power of AI can actually be applied to this massive pool of oil? >> That's right. So we start by kind of looking at the target operating model. What is it that the span of control for procurement's going to be? What is it that they want to do, what is it that they have ownership over? Then we identify kind of what are the technologies that are in place to house some of that information to help you make better decisions and to ultimately serve your end customers. And as we identify that architecture of what's going to be needed in the future, that's when we start getting into how we create and develop that oil infrastructure. And so as we look at the gaps in the infrastructure an application like Coupa can plug in with the appropriate procure to pay process, with the contracting process, with sourcing, spend analytics, whatever that may be, and it helps to plug the different gaps that allow you to kind of get all of that data into one place. >> Allowing customers to as Coupa says, spend smarter. I wanted to get your opinion on this BSM category that they are working to develop and lead. Business spend management. You guys recently, KPMG did a study on the future of procurement. Tell us a little bit about some of the interesting insights that came from that study and where you think business spend management is really going to be applicable and a big driver of business value. >> Yeah so, that's great, and I think business spend management, you know it continues to expand. I mean what Coupa's been every year, you've been to these conferences, is continuing to expand their portfolio and the modules that they have in order to kind of attack business spend management. And it's an important factor, a lot of spend happens through procurement and they need to have the application infrastructure to manage that. In the future procurement we talk a little bit about supplier centricity and customer centricity. So how is it that you're being able to work more effectively with your supplier, share information. Can they actually log in to the portal and see what the ratings are on the products that people are buying from them, I mean that's where we're kind of moving to. Customer centricity, giving them that Amazon-like experience so that they can go in on mobile and go in on any which way they want to, buy the things that they want, or be prompted to buy the things that they want. How are you innovating in categories, how are you using external data insights. You know the days of having that 20 year category manager who knows one category, sitting in one place, it's just not possible anymore. There's so much data and information out there you have to be able to leverage all of the external insights. And then of course using the digital platform to bring everything together. And that's where kind of Coupa plays, and the other e-procurement solutions, they're bringing all those insights together, allowing the foundation to be set so that you can execute on the processes that have to happen within it. >> We talk a lot about customer focus, customer centricity, Rob Bernshteyn talked about it this morning. Dig a little bit more into what you talked about with KPMG in terms of supplier centricity and some of the value that all of these suppliers are getting. How is KPMG helping some of these suppliers to really dial up their business, get better insights and really make a bigger impact with what they're delivering? >> Yeah, I mean it's really about visibility into the transactions that are happening and how their clients are using their products or services. So the more you can analyze around spend patterns, about the products that are being purchased, not purchased, the rigor of the catalog environment that's being created for your clients, the more they can analyze around that that allows them to be a little bit more focused in the way that they're dealing with their customers. And so we talk a lot about creating a very content rich environment. I mean if you went to Amazon today and you didn't see a picture, you didn't see ratings, you didn't see a description, would you purchase something? No. And that's what's happening inside organizations. Gone are the days where you have one line item that says this is it, and you don't know what you're buying. And so creating this content rich environment which is allowing and requiring suppliers to get into the environment to create their robust catalogs is really important. And so supplier's going to be a big part of what they're doing in the future to create this kind of appropriate spend management platform where the catalogs are set. >> I'm really getting on board to harness the power of that data. To your point, we have, the consumerization effect is so strong. We have this expectation that we can get anything and one of the things that Coupa was talking about this morning in the general session was not only the data, that they are now harnessing the power for their customers, for their suppliers, but also let's allow companies to go through the Coupa platform and search through software and products and deploy and manage and pay everything through that, bring in that consumerization approach to businesses in any industry. >> That's right. That's every right. So having it in one place makes it a little bit simpler, the visibility's there. I think the other thing that we can see a lot of is just self service. You walk into an airport, you do your own boarding pass. You come out of a parking garage, you pay for your parking and you leave. There's no people involved and frankly consumers like that. So being able to create an environment when you can do self service and things are being pushed to you to make decisions from versus having to go out and do a tremendous amount of research to make decisions is going to be a huge factor. I mean in the area of supplier risk management having bots and things that are mining social media in different areas for what's happening with your supplier so that you can be alerted to an event prior to making a large contractual obligation with them. You know, those are the types of things that we haven't seen in the past which I think we're going to get into now. >> It's so exciting. Dipan, I wish we had more time to get into it but thank you so much for stopping by The Cube and sharing what you guys at KPMG are doing to help customers really extract a tremendous amount of value and spend smarter. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much for having me. Appreciate it. >> For Dipan Karumsi, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube from Coupa Inspire 19. Thanks for watching. (bright music)