(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE everyone Lisa Martin here. On the ground in Las Vegas at COUPA INSPIRE 2022. This is our second day of coverage here. There's been about 2,400 to 2,500 folks at the event. This year people are ready to come back. I've been happy to talk with lots Coupa folks, their partners, their customers and I've got both a customer and a partner here with me. Heidi Banks joins us, the Senior director of Global Procurement at Jabil. Heidi it's great to have you on the program. >> Thank you for having me give. >> Give the audience an overview of Jabil and what you guys do. >> So Jabil is a $30 billion manufacturing solutions partner that provides contract manufacturing services for 450 of the world's largest and most premier brands around the globe. Most people don't know our name but we're the wonderful face behind the name. >> Well you guys had, I was looking at some stats, over 260,000 employees across 100 locations. Very customer centric you guys are, as is Coupa, this good obviously synergy there but you had some objectives from a global procurement perspective. What were those? What were some of the challenges that you wanted to solve? >> So about seven years ago, Jabil went on a journey to identify what challenges we had out in the indirect procurement space. Being such a large global company, we had no idea what we were spending on indirect at the of time. After a little bit of digging, we found out that we had over 2 billion in spend that was untapped from a category management perspective. And so we knew that we needed to grow as a company and PaaS technology as a foundation, as our goal and our mission in the company is to be the most technologically advanced manufacturer solutions partner for our customers. >> Was there any sort of one thing or a compelling event seven years ago that caused you guys to go, "We need to be really getting our hands around this indirect spend?" >> So we started off by bringing in category managers and they were doing amazing job delivering savings in our contracts, but we had no way to deliver that out to the company. And the company being so big in so many different jurisdictions in countries around the world, you could negotiate the best contract in the world, but if you couldn't communicate it out to your users then it was a challenge to really capture that savings and make sure we were delivering bottom line savings to the company. >> And you guys are, we're talking about three different SAP ERP systems so a lot of technology in the environment. What were some of the core technology requirements that Jabil had when it came looking for a business plan management solution? >> Yeah, so we were looking for something that was very user friendly. Of course, Coupa takes that box very well. Also something that could drive governance and policy controls again challenging being such a global organization and making sure that things were going according to our policy into our global category managers to be sourced and negotiated for the company. We looked for one that was end to end from a business spend management platform perspective. We wanted something that was integrated and could cover three ERP systems from one pane of glass across the company. So we could get great analytics without having to search in so many different places. >> That is so key. I was talking with Rob, I was talking with Raja and they were all talking about how those silos still exist and how they're helping organizations like Jabil break those down and give them that single pane of glass, as you mentioned, to be able to see, to get that visibility into indirect spend, for example. Talk to me about the solutions that you implemented from Coupa. >> So we started off with Coupa's procure to pay system. Really our focus was to get off of our old system as quickly as we could and get everyone managing on the same policy controls approval flows. We then also had analytics, so we had Coupa AIC and brought in analytics and in the last year and a half I've also deployed strategic and tactical sourcing through Coupa as well, and spend guard from a audit control and compliance perspective. >> So then that the phrase "sweet synergy" that actually probably means a lot to you Coupa was talking about that during the keynote this morning. Your Jabil is living that sweet synergy kind of experience through Coupa >> That's right. As we source in Coupa and we can see, are there different behaviors that we need to look into maybe suppliers that are bidding at the last minute and winning or less than that desirable number of suppliers coming in or duplicate invoices and being able to really look through that and see spend patterns that we would never otherwise uncover is highly important to us from a compliance standpoint, we've gotten a great value out of that solution. >> And in terms of value, one of the things I know that was important to you when you were looking for the right technology partner, was you wanted to involve other folks within the organization across IT, other lines of business. Talk to me about how important that was to bring in that cross-functional team to help make the right decision. >> Yeah, that was one of the most critical things that we did. We needed to make sure, especially being an SAP shop right, we needed to make sure that we were standing back and really being impartial in our decision and driving a non-biased decision in that RFP process. And so we got our executives together, talked to them about the value drivers and the ROI that we could do if we had all of the right support from the right departments, so that we could avoid resistance as we tried to deploy in such a rapid way. So we brought IT, legal, users together, procurement and in advance did a balanced scorecard approach to say these were the important factors that we had whether it was IT infrastructure, whether it was capabilities to make sure that when we came out of that decision and we picked a solution, we could all look at each other and have a handshake and say it was the right decision for us as a company, and so no departments had push back at that point because of that approach that we took. >> An objective approach that you took. >> That's right. >> Let's talk about some of the outcomes look at, actually let's not, let's talk about your deployment first, 'cause you guys started with probably your most challenging sites whereas other folks might go. Let's start with the low hanging fruit and kind of work our way up. Jabil said, "Nope, we're going to flip the script on that." >> That's right. So we, we went with what we call an east to west strategy. We are heavily concentrated in our Asia markets and so we were also wanted to deliver our ROI as quickly as possible and get our spend into the system as quickly as possible. So we we went live with 12 sites, 11 mega sites in China and our corporate headquarters in St. Petersburg in order to get that spend in as quickly as possible and get our ROI delivered. So we started in China and the US then in our second phase deployed the rest of Asia and then the US and North America and then over to Europe. So we went regional from a time zone perspective but also just I say, go bold. I hear a lot of people that start small and then grow but if you want to deliver that ROI and get your money out of that system as soon as possible go big or go home. >> I like that go big, go home. It's like Mick Ebeling was talking about this morning from not impossible labs commit and then figure it out. >> That's right. >> That's right. >> You know what? That's actually brilliant advice because it's probably the opposite that a lot of us want to be we want to be able to figure this out and then go, okay we can do that. And he said no >> Yeah >> To the opposite. >> To the opposite >> Did you have to get buy-in from those cross-functional folks to say we want to start with our most challenging sites first, was that a team decision? >> That was a decision that we did just basically to get that ROI delivered. And we also had a really strong team that still partners with our Coupa admins today that were really invested in getting onto a solution where they can automate and drive control and compliance. And so not only do we involve the team in the solution selection, but also in the global design. So we brought different cross-functional departments together into one location together, we made all of our decisions on how we were going to configure Coupa So that way again all of our divisions and departments had buy-in to how we were going to move forward and then we went from there. >> Well then, and in that case everybody feels like they have a stake >> That's right >> In the issue they have a vested interest >> That's right. >> Which is critical for these types of large projects to be successful. >> That's right. So they were involved in the RFP process so they knew why we were doing it and they were then involved and the design and how we were going to set it up so that they knew that they had a vested interest in how it was going to perform in the end. And then of course there were things that we had to tweak. So we needed to have a design committee that we could come back to and make changes as we needed to, make changes throughout the projects. You don't always get every single decision right. The first time, but you need to be nimble and make changes first and get consensus across the company. >> Right. Talk to me about some of the outcomes I know I've seen a lot of stats in your case study and I always love those numbers always jump out at me. Talk to me about some of those metrics based business outcomes that Jabil is achieving so far. >> Yeah. So in the last four years we've had a heavy focus on catalog. So actually in the last few months, we've gone from 20 to 30% by using Coupa analytics and drilling really into the details and putting really great category strategies in order to drive more catalog penetration. We've got great stats around electronic invoicing especially in certain countries where people think it's not possible. >> Right. >> There's a great change management story we have for what we've achieved in our Asian markets around electronic invoicing and from an ROI perspective, we were able to deliver 3X our ROI by the end of year two which we projected would take three years to do and 7X by year four. So we had a very conservative and achievable ROI that got the buy-in and then we were able to accelerate it by being aggressive, but also with a great solution it was easy to then get that done. >> Can you talk a little bit about the change management that you were able to achieve in the Asian market change management is the difficult thing to do. People are resistant to change, one of the things we've learned in the last two years is sometimes the change comes in there's nothing you can do about it but how did you affect that change management within that culture in the Asian market? >> Yeah. So with the executive buy-in that we had because they knew that there was high potential for us to deliver an ROI. We had executive sponsorship that helped us get through some of those barriers. So if we decided not to bring certain users into the system, for example and there was pushback that they needed to have access we had executive messaging as to why from a policy governance and control standpoint we couldn't break that. So we used our executives' voice and their support to do that. But also we brought in a great system that was user are friendly and so we didn't get a lot of resistance in, in that sense. So they actually embraced the change compared to the solution we had in place before. So by making the right selection from a user centric company we also didn't get as much resistance there as well. >> That's nice the path of least resistance is good especially if you're not exactly sure if you're going to find it, but verifying that and getting that ROI is is probably a big, a big win. Talk to me a little bit about you guys liked Coupa so much you had such, you mentioned 3X ROI within, you said the first year? >> With after year two >> After year two >> Yeah. >> 3X ROI, you liked it so much you decided to become a Coupa partner. Talk to me about that. What does that mean? What are you guys doing as partner? >> Yeah, so this is a super exiting thing for us to adventure into. So we pride ourselves on our theme as built for practitioners by practitioners. We've run the system every single day. We've been running it for years. So my team members are deep in the knowledge and capabilities of Coupa it's functionality, how to manage it every day, how to get the most you out of it and we want to share that knowledge with other Coupa customers to get the most value out of their system as well. So whether that's optimization and helping them get more out of their system or whether it's roadmap or assessments in our perspective, or even doing net new implementations we're excited to venture into that area of services with Coupa as a partner. >> Or have you guys started doing that yet? >> Today is our first Coupa inspire as a partner, which is exciting. And we literally just got started in the last few months. So we are working on getting our first customer here hopefully very shortly and have had a lot of of really great conversations with customers at the show so far. >> That's one of the great things that Coupa took the risk to bring us all together because there's they have a phenomenal community of which you guys have been a part now you said I believe about seven years, but there's nothing that replaces the connections that you make in the community that is grown from doing events like this. I imagine that you've gotten to talk with a lot of prospect >> Yes. >> Prospective customers who, what, how did you do this? This seems like an impossible feat that you've gotten to share with them. This is doable, here's how we did it. >> That's right. So fortunately I've been at previous inspires as well. So I've gotten to talk to people that I haven't seen in a couple of years, which is always exciting. I've been able to talk to customers that I've done, referrals for with Coupa before that are now Coupa customers and we get to talk about that and also those perspective customers and helping them know that it is doable, it is achievable you can get consensus in a decentralized company where all the sites if you have lots, lots of sites and countries have their own autonomy, you can do it. You can do it fast. You can do it effective if you take the right approach. And so it's exciting to get here and share that opportunity and our adventure and our journey with Coupa and the journey is only just beginning. >> Right, what are some of the things that you are excited about in terms of the innovations that they've announced at the event? I know Coupa is very much symbiotic with its customers that the community very much generates a lot of the direction in which the technology goes. But what are some of the things that you've heard announced that you thought, yes, they're going they continue to go in the right direction. >> Yeah. So there's some actual foundational capabilities around things like payment agreements and group carts and things that actually we've contributed through either customer cabs or VP sessions with design, just doing collaboration together but I'm also excited to see some of their price benchmarking that they're doing so that we can know how well are we doing and from our pricing standpoint and also where they're going supply chain I'm excited to see where they're going with that. Being a big supply chain company ourselves, we're hoping that all turns out to be something that we can innovate with Coupa on and hopefully have in the future as well. >> Well, as they said, Rob said it to me just an hour ago, they're tip of the iceberg but what its seems that you've become Heidi yourself and Jabil is really kind of an influencer within the Coupa community. We appreciate you coming by theCUBE, sharing with us what you've accomplished and how you're expanding your Coupa partnership into helping other companies. >> Great. Thank you again for having me today. >> My pleasure. >> All right. >> For Heidi Banks, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of COUPA INSPIRE 2022 from Las Vegas. Stick around my next guest joins me momentarily. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey guys and girls. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Coupa Inspire 2022, from the Cosmopolitan, in bustling Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here, and as I mentioned, day two of our coverage and fresh from the main stage, Raja Hammoud joins me, the Executive Vice President of products at Coupa. Raja, welcome back to theCUBE and happy 10th anniversary at Coupa. >> Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you, and welcome back to Inspire. >> Thank you. It's so great- >> We're so happy you're here. >> It's great to be here. So you're just about coming up on your 10 anniversary with Coupa. You showed some great photos of your time there but you've seen, you've lived the evolution that is this rocket ship that's Coupa. >> Raja: It's been incredible journey. I really couldn't believe at first it's been 10. This is the longest I've ever been anywhere. And I honestly feel more refreshed and excited than even when I joined back in the day 10 years ago. And so much has changed, but also so much has not. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> The size of course. We were like 60 people when I joined, the product development team was one person in, in a product, roughly 12 engineers, and fast forward to the scale that's today, it's phenomenal difference. But what has not changed is the, the core values, how, the hustle, how people love working with each other, how we support customers, how we keep stepping up our game how we believe none of us is as smart as all of us, and the community keeps getting stronger and stronger. It's been, it's been really exciting journey. >> The theme of none of us is as smarter as all of us, I'm not sure if I got that right, but the idea is you feel that when you're talking to Coupa partners, I've had the opportunity to talk with Coupa partners and customers and Coupa folks that, that is not just a value statement, people are living that. >> Raja: Yeah. It's, it's everywhere. In the, in the company walls, outside the company walls, you often see product people in different organizations where, they start living in an ivory tower, they think they know everything, I mean, back to what we were discussing earlier about Barbara, when she talked about, get out of your doors, right? A lot of people can tend to do that. We always, from the beginning, believed in the best ideas are out there and you collaborate with each other. And I truly, truly believe that the success that we have achieved today to our community is in a large, large part, because we believed in that. So like on Monday, we hosted, I can't keep track of the number now, so, so many in-parallel Community Advisory Board meetings, and just talking to the products managers and everybody is buzzing with new ideas. And when we go back, there's so much new innovation that has just been co-created here in this conference, and this keeps going on and on and on. >> Lisa: Yeah. I like how you call it, the Community Advisory Board. I'm still used to hearing CAB as Customer Advisory Board, but what Coupa has built, especially with the launch of the Moonshot, the, the community AI, is, is just that. >> Yes. >> It's a very collaborative community. One of the things that's around here, hashtags everywhere, but #United by the Power of Spend. >> Yes. >> What does that mean to you as the EVP of products, and what do you think that means to the community? >> When I think... What we are doing, we're building this platform that is powering all these businesses out there. And the reality of it is you can only, only do so much when you try to do things alone. When we are doing things together, we are way more successful, we are more profitable, we are more sustainable, we are more efficient. And community.ai from a technology standpoint, is making that happen, because what we are doing is taking AI, applying it to all this 3.3 trillion in data, and then bringing back prescriptions that we give back to each and every customer so that everybody can see where they are, how they up their games, and we connect them with other people like them. Now, people love coming to conferences like this, but even in conferences like this, if you think about it, the people you're going to meet, it's, some people are going to do matchmaking but you are also losing an opportunities of meeting the maximum number of people who've done exactly the thing that you did. But when you have the ability to look at all of that data and you can match make people. So we did that already with, for sourcing professionals. So if you are somebody who source a certain category, we can tell somebody else has done something like this in this geography and we offer you to connect to each other. >> Lisa: Wow. >> So this is incredibly powerful way where we are really uniting the whole community by spend, making everybody truly stronger together. >> Lisa: Matchmaker in, in a sense. >> It is matchmaking. >> But it's, but it's- >> It's Spend matchmaking. >> Spend matchmaking, but it's also the opportunity to unite professionals across sourcing, procurement- >> Raja: Yes. >> ... finance, treasury. >> Raja: Yes. >> To your point, and, and Rob said this in his keynote, and he said it here on theCUBE, you know, we've got to break down these silos. >> Raja: Yes. >> People and companies functioning in silos are not going to be successful. >> Raja: Yes. This has been one of the, probably one of the things that we were talking earlier, what has changed, what hasn't. This is one of the fundamental things that has never changed since I've joined. The vision has been very clear. The execution on it, of how we drive successful business spend management program is by breaking down the silos and this idea of sweet synergy, where in product, you start building these capabilities that helps these professionals in the different organizations to actually connect on the touch points, where, where things really matter. >> Lisa: Sweet synergy, was that thing from a concept perspective, did that come from the community, in terms of Coupa going, this is actually what's happening, this synergy across the BSM suite? >> Yes. So in the very beginning, it was early idea. I would say in the first two Inspires that we did, we hadn't given it actually the name itself, and we used to call it unified capabilities, and it started with the first silos we broke down. The first silos we broke down were procurement and AP. And they didn't even used to talk in the same room or even want to care about each other. So we started building so many capabilities that brought these teams together and little by little the community started to feel that and see the value of that. And then the community started to ask us to go break down more silos. So in the beginning, I would say the, the vision before I even joined, the company was on that trajectory. And the early customers saw that and they championed it and then they drove us to do more. So they came to us and said could you please do what you did here in contract? Could you please do what you did here in sourcing? And I was in a meeting last week, a leadership meeting, and one question was asked to leaders in the services team about what are they hearing about, from the customers, about a particular area. And it was music to our ears when we heard the customers are asking for more synergy, right? So, they even have the name for it and they're asking for more and more, and we have built hundreds of these already, but the reality is there is so much opportunity. >> Lisa: Right. >> The world is siloed, no technology has attempted to do that. And I think that's what's a exciting is to go and forge new grounds and do something very special to unite everyone together. >> You guys talked about the waves. Rob talked about the waves yesterday. You talked about it again this morning. And when I think of Inspired community, as that third wave, I see it on both sides. I see the Inspired community that is the Coupa community, but also what you just talked about, that flywheel of that sort of symbiotic relationship that you guys have with your customers as Coupa in and of itself being in a community inspired by the community that it has built. >> Raja: Yes, it's, it's very, very, it's a circular effect. Like it, we inspire one another, and we strengthen one another, and it's, it's just a beautiful, beautiful thing. One of the special things that we are starting to do is we want to take the whole product experience itself, to be a complete community experience. So anywhere you are going to Coupa, when it makes sense, of course, you are not only looking at your data, you are getting connected with people for that particular thing. So we've done that already for 15 different product areas and we're constantly doing more and more and more and more. You can imagine one day we can, where we can start within the product pages themselves, where we host community experts to talk via video and connect with others. So you bring that whole community experience alive in a product in enterprise software, which has not been done. >> Kind of like creating your own influencer network. >> Yes, yes, yes. And give people their voice and, and, and it becomes exciting. It is very different when you're just working on your own and driving goals, and you have no idea how good that can pass on the world. And then when right then and there, you get to learn that some people have hit that, some people have achieved these goals, you just get excited, "I want to hit that goal too. Who are these people? Connect me with these leaders. Let's have a conversation. How did they do it?" And they start creating best practices together. We even have started places where they collaborate on actual documents and templates, and they put them in the community exchange as a way for people to share with others, even taking templates from the product putting them back into a community exchange. So it is sharing, being enabled on the platform, platform itself. >> Lisa: How did you guys function during the pandemic, the last two years when we couldn't get together? >> Raja: Yeah. >> I know that your customers are really the lifeblood of Coupa and vice versa. >> Raja: Yes. >> But talk to me about some of the things that Coupa did with its customers, you know, by video conferencing, for example, that really helped the evolution and some of the innovations that you announced this morning. >> When we first... when the pandemic first hit I think like we all didn't believe what, what is going on. And there was this, I would call it a beautiful period in a way, despite how horrific that was, and that period was where everyone rose to the occasion, everybody wanted to help one another. Across Coupa everywhere, we started having documents of how can step up and help our customers, help our communities. We started to look at how we get PPE, and get it in the hands of our customers. We have access to suppliers. We started looking at helping suppliers with digital payments to speed things up. So, so many things we started doing as a community to just help each other. And then as we got to the next level, then we started, of course, starting to do things over, over zoom. And the big surprise, was we were incredibly productive. If anything, we were worried about people feeling burnt out. >> Yeah. >> Because they were just in it, completely in it. And it created a lot of new avenues for us because often you go and do these meetings in person. Now you could have a user experience session with a customer very easily, they're available more often than they used to. >> Lisa: Right. >> So we did not miss a beat with the community. We moved into virtual caps. We had the advantage of having them recorded as well, where we could have the global development teams learn and see exactly what the, what the customers are are co-creating together. And our goal lives accelerated, because a lot of these implementations, they used to happen in person, so schedules, they actually got accelerated- >> Lisa: Right. >> ...through that. Now of course, there is nothing that matches to this. You can do it, you can do a lot, but a ton of the collaboration comes from real life dialogue and kind of conversation. So it's that balance between the two that I think will be great. >> Lisa: What are some of the things that you've heard the last few days? You mentioned the Partners Summit and, and the Community Advisory Boards on Monday, yesterday, everything kicked off today. What are some of the things that you've heard in your meetings that really inspire you on say the next 10 years at Coupa? >> Raja: By far, by far, by far, it's a validation of, that what we are doing is, we're absolutely on target with it, and that, we just can do so much more. The silos are massive and there are so so many opportunities that you hear in every different areas that we could be doing this, we could be doing this together. So we can break down more and more silos. And using community.ai is just the tip of the iceberg of what we are, what we are doing. Yes, we created tens and tens of capabilities, helping, helping the community with all of that, but data drives everything. And when you look at that, every single process in every single silo can be informed by the power of data within your own company, and then even better, data across. And, and to the point where we're talking about concepts that customers are really excited about, even thinking about this community, they're customers of each other. And when you are a customer of each other what are the different ways as a community, you can help one another more. So we're talking about community netting as new types of concepts. >> Lisa: Talk to me a little about that. You mentioned the community netting this morning but I didn't quite... Help me understand. >> Raja: It is very simple terms is if, if we are buying from each other and we have to do money movements every time I have to pay you, I have to incur fees and likewise, but since we are part of this community we can manage that relationship. So we just pay the Delta, we net it out. So it, it saves reconciliation times it saves money movement. And these are tip of the icebergs of these very cool things that we're doing together. >> Wow. That's fantastic. Last question for you, as you talk with prospects who are in the early stages, or, or still determining, do we go through like a supply chain digital transformation? I mean, I think of companies that probably haven't now or need to get on the bandwagon. >> Raja: Yeah. >> What are some of the things that you advise to those customers to be able to do what Mick Ebeling talked about this morning and that is, commit and then figure it out? >> Raja: Yes. The number one thing is just make sure you don't do the analysis paralysis. There are just so many opportunities so many opportunities start with a project, get going, and it creates incredible momentum, and then you can move on from one to another, to another, to another, instead of trying to just go for a year or two, trying to look at how the world has changed in that process. And so often you could see that projects pay for themselves within the first month of go life. You do that, you'll create another one. And it's not like you are coming in to do something so new nobody has done. Hundreds and hundreds and thousands as a matter of fact, of other community members have done that. It is proven. So get started with those and then continue. Other things I will be talking to them about is to make sure that they understand the way we work is all about partnerships spread. Often people who haven't worked with us in the enterprise software, they're used to working with vendors. We are not that. We never were that. Like the number one, if we're not going to be real partners, honest, transparent and work with each other, we don't waste each other's time. >> Lisa: Well, Raja, it's been great having you on the program. I've really enjoyed your keynote this morning. Congratulations on your 10 years at Coupa. >> Raja: Thank you. >> I'm excited to see what the next 10 years brings for you. We appreciate your insites and everything that Coupa is doing in partnership with its customers is very evident in an event like this. >> Raja: Thank you. And thank you for coming and covering us as well. We really appreciate it. >> Lisa: It's our pleasure to be here. >> Thank you. >> For Raja Hammoud, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage, day two of Coupa Inspire 2022, from Las Vegas. (upbeat music)

(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)

(bright music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of Coupa Inspire 2022. This is day two. We've been on the ground in Las Vegas at the cosmopolitan, Lisa Martin here with Kyle Rogers. Great to be talking with Coupa customers, partners all the good stuff. Kyle, you are the partner finance effectiveness at Clearsulting. - Yes. >> Welcome to the program. >> Thank you. Thank you. I'm super happy to be here. And we're really excited to be a partner with Coupa. >> Talk to me a little bit about Clearsulting, so the audience gets an understanding of what you guys are doing. >> Perfect. So I'll introduce myself first. I'm Kyle Rogers, as you mentioned, I'm a partner at the firm. A leader finds affecting this practice and we focus on a few things. So first is like general finds and accounting operating model work. The second is a lot of global based services, shared services work. So helping clients think about where their talent should sit and how those global workflows should work. And then what's really important to this week is, we've got a deep capability and procure to pay. And at a Clearsulting, we work with our clients to drive thoughtful and complex solutions for procurement and finance executives using digital as a key enabler in that. And we've got a number of practices. So we focus on finds effectiveness, which I lead. We've got enterprise performance management, risk advisory record report, and treasury. >> One of the things that is the spirit of Coupa is collaboration, the community. How does clear salty, how do you collaborate with your clients? >> Yeah, it's a great question because we think collaboration is so core to being successful in driving good outcomes. So the ways we collaborate with our clients are first, we bring deep expertise around, procure to pay functional subject matter of experts. And we compliment that with our innovation center which is a team that's focused on really staying on the forefront of digital and technical solutions and making sure we bring them together to give robust and powerful outcomes for our clients. And then lastly, and really importantly, we meet our clients where they are. They're all at different stages in their I maturity. They've got different goals and objectives. Some might be trying to have a focused really niche outcome whereas others might be transformational in nature. So we make sure that we right size our solutions to really get them where they're trying to go. >> When you're talking with customers that are maybe in the infancy of digitizing procure to pay for example, what are some of the concerns that they have? I mean, I guess these days if you're not digital, you're not very competitive. >> Right. Digital is so important to what they do. Not only to reduce costs and take in efficiencies out of the business but also when you think about, the importance of decision support, right? So tightening the cycle time between business activity and making sense of it using technology as core and fundamental to being successful. >> What are some of the trends that you're seeing in procurement especially anything top of mind the last two years? >> Yeah, so what we love about Clearsulting is we've got a broad base of clients. And when we meet and work with each of them they all have their different needs and goals. And we've been able to see some through lines across each that have started to emerge. And we've really seen three trends emerge. So the first is, there's a a big focus on operational efficiency. So moving towards a touchless world, taking cost out of the business and really moving towards exception based, system driven processes and more towards insight generation decisions important alike. And then the second is there's a real increased focus on getting total visibility into your spend management, right? So understanding who your suppliers are, what you're buying from them, how much you're spending and really understanding are they giving you the value that you thought you were going to get when you onboarded them. And that's really come to the floor through a lot of the supply chain volatility, a lot of the volatility around pricing, especially when you think look at things like commodities and just getting real your arms around what, what you're spending on. And then lastly, there's a new and diverse set of talent in the workforce today, right? And the last 10 to 20 years we've seen digitally native talent graduate into the workforce. And what their hopes and desires and needs are in the workplace are very different than the generation before them. So just giving them tools and digital technologies that will attract them but also retain them when they're here. - Right. - Yeah. And then also when you think about some of the shifts towards a more remote, remote, or hybrid model, having tools and capabilities that allow you to do that and Coupa is a great example. >> Right. Well, you talked about, different generations and the younger generations. I think there's four or five generations that are in the workforce today. >> Wow. - And so when you think of, you talked about the remoteness hybrid environment that we're still living in how everything has changed so dramatically in the last couple of years. - Yeah. >> That being touchless, contactless, paperless really became essential for so many businesses. How do you guys, what do you define as touchless? How is it different than say paperless? Is it just another the way of saying or does it actually mean something different? >> It's a little, it's different and it's not truly touchless because you still need to have, the human as part of the process, right? But when we say touchless, it's identifying those points of where is it rules based? Where can we use business logic to drive some system based decision and taking the robot out of the human as some say, and really having the humans spend their time on how can I use this information to support the business, get insights out of it and focus my time on work that's meaningful and powerful. >> Well work that's meaningful and powerful to them that will make them want to stay at their jobs but also work that allows them to be able to focus on more strategic projects for the business let the other stuff be touchless and automated where it can be. >> Right. - So that their focus is on more business critical activities or initiatives. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. So when you think about things like supporting sourcing on making sure that they've got their strategic suppliers set up and their spending with the right suppliers. That is so much more valuable obvious to your time than reconciling invoice to goods receipt, right? >> You mentioned insights and visibility and visibility. I was just talking with a Coupa customer that had uncovered two billion dollars in indirect spend that they couldn't see before Coupa. And I just can't help, but think how many businesses in every industry are out there with billions in indirect spend that they literally can't see. If you can't see it, you can't be able to make the right decisions on it. Talk to me about enabling that visibility as a key outcome for your clients. >> Right, and I think that to your point it's not just that what we also see is there's not great duplicate detection. So a lot of times our customers or clients are paying their suppliers more than once for the same inventory. So getting their view on exactly what they're spending, what's paid, what's not paid, how is it impacting our supply chain? How is that balancing up against our revenue forecast? To make sure that we've got inventory moving through our supply chain at the right time. The visibility there is fundamental to being successful in the current day marketplace. >> Talk to me about now, some of your experiences working directly with Coupa clients. What are some of the things that you've been able to enable? Any stories stick out in your mind is this really articulates the value that we bring with to Coupa. >> Absolutely. So we worked with, we just wrapped up a project and the client was using some legacy ERPs. They had gone through a period of pretty significant MNA. So they have a pretty technology landscape and they wanted to find a procure to pay solution that met all of their requirements. And Coupa was the perfect fit. We helped walk them through the process and move towards a point where every single invoice had to get manually entered. Every single invoice had to get manually matched. >> Oh, wow. - Yeah. Two, to leveraging a lot of capabilities Coupa has around EDI and DCR and the supplier portal to automate a lot of that and then streamline a lot of the matching. And on the back end, just getting visibility into who you're spending your money with. As you mentioned you said two billion dollars of an indirect spend that they had no idea where that was going. That is very common >> Common? - Common. - Is it? I mean, not that amount, but the fact that you don't have, pure visible end to end spend is very common. >> Are you seeing any trends towards that, maybe changing, considering what we've all been through in the last two years when suddenly everybody went home and you couldn't get to those paper invoices or those paper POs, do you see more businesses going," help us out, we've got to digitize. We don't have a choice." >> Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So it's moving suppliers onto more digital invoice submission methods whether it be the portal whether it be digital PDF sending in through common inboxes. And then moving it away from invoices not going to the manufacturing plants anymore. We've got that going to a central location. If it needs to be physical, you've got one place that houses it versus many desperate ones. >> Well, and Coupa talked a lot about that, the last couple days about essentially getting rid of the silos. - Yes. I was talking with Rob earlier today. Raja Hammoud was here as well. And talking about, there's still a lot of silos out there, that our organizations are operating under which limits their visibility and limits their potential, I think, to be competitive. >> Right. And I think what we find is procurement is historically, has been a very siloed organization. Because that's been the back of what a lot of businesses grow on as either R and D or procurement buyers. And they don't want to have a lot of control in their space. So making sure that they can have the flexibility to buy real time, maybe use a lot of institutional knowledge to overcome some process or system gaps. So there can be some challenges moving them into centralized model, but when you think about the broader business case on rationalizing your supplier base and making sure that you're getting most favorable terms with your suppliers. And then also having control over when cash goes out the door, who goes out the door too, far outweighs some of the other benefits associated with having it decentralized. >> These days, businesses in any industry don't have time to wait for tribal knowledge to be able to help determine the next direction. We are also used to everything on demand that the real time access to the data, the insights where are where's the money going? Who are we contracting with? That real time is no longer a nice thing to have for organizations. It's a requirement. >> Right. And, I think one big shift we've seen is, a lot of companies used to be organized functionally. So meaning you had finance operating a silo procurement operate in silo, IT operating a silo but that's really been flipped on its head. And then that now they're organized around end in processes. So when you look at procure to pay, you're touching a diverse set of stakeholders from sourcing, procurement, IT, treasury, legal, finance, and so on. So tribal knowledge doesn't work anymore. You have to have tight handoffs, you have to have tight orchestration and you need to have stakeholders aligned. >> How do you help customers navigate that? Because one of the things that can be challenging is, especially for maybe more historied organizations that are used to and very comfortable in their swim lanes and their silos. How do you help them from a change management perspective, be able to connect all those pieces together so that ultimately everybody's job is, able to deliver more value to the business? >> Right. So one of the things that we at Clearsulting are really good at is we understand the language of each of those stakeholder groups. So we can talk to finance, we can talk to procurement, we can talk to sourcing and IT and we understand what makes them tick, and what their objectives are and how they think. So when we work with our clients, we really make sure that we have that through line around. What's the common story here, the common message that's going to resonate with everyone because it's really important to have your stakeholders engaged and on board to have successful outcomes with Coupa or any sort of p to p transformation. >> I want to talk about talent for a second. You mentioned that a minute ago and we're all living through the great resignation. >> Yes. - I'm sure you have friends. I do too. That decided to make changes during the last couple of years. The opportunities are there, but it's important for companies to be able to retain talent. But, and part of that to your point earlier was especially for the younger generations you need to be able to have the technology and the capabilities to enable that generation to want to stay and grow within an organization. >> Right. And I think Coupa has really driven value to our client's talent strategies in a couple ways, chiefly, it's moving the robot out of a human, which I mentioned a little bit about earlier. So a lot of the activities that are repetitive, rule based, that historically we've thrown people out, to try and get it done. Now, the system can handle that. As long as you've got your processes designed accordingly, it can accommodate a lot of those exceptions. And the work that people are supporting after that is more meaningful, right? It's understanding, okay, what's valuable to the business? How can I help support decisions to do that? And what can we do around continuous improvement to continue to maximize what we're doing? And then secondly, around the great resignation, the remote or hybrid model is a key recruit recruitment mechanism. - Yes. And using Coupa, which is a SaaS solution. And one that can be orchestrated and designed globally, allows for more flexible models both from remote to in person but also allows for global flexibility, right? And global workflows. >> Global flexibility, global workflows, but also that global collaboration that I think we've we all need to have. And that's really what Coupa thrives on that community. That's really, I always say it's very symbiotic. >> Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And Coupa being an integrated solution that as we mentioned, is end to end source to pay, allows for seamless intergration across each of your communities and each parts of your business, because then you can look at things globally as opposed to some of the siloed and more regional views that they had before. >> Right. What are some of the, the last question for you. What are some of the things that are exciting to you about what you've heard at the event the last couple of days, some of the future direction of Clearsulting. What's on your plate? >> The session yesterday morning around collaboration was really powerful to us. Because we find the collaboration with our clients is a big change agent to driving value. And then thinking about your supplier network as an ecosystem to collaborate on, is a big takeaway from us this weekend. And it's been really powerful to see everyone working together and finding creative solutions that meet everyone's needs in a global workforce. >> Yep. I agree. Kyle, thank you for joining me on the program this afternoon talking about Clearsulting, your partnership with Coupa and how you're helping those customers go touch us. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you, Lisa, it's a pleasure to be here. >> All right. Well, Kyle Rogers, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube's coverage of Coupa inspire day two, coming at you from Las Vegas. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here, covering Coupa Insp!re 2022. theCUBE is really happy to be here at this event. About 2,500 folks are here, which is great to see. I have two guests from Microsoft with me. Please, welcome Jonathan Allen, the director of global network modeling design and planning, and Cassie Wang, senior global network model and design engineer. Guys, thanks so much for joining me today. >> No problem. Thanks Lisa for having us. >> Thank you. >> So let's talk about what's going on at Microsoft, the Microsoft supply chain. Supply chain is a term that's on everyone's lips these days for some interesting reason, but talk to me a little bit about the Microsoft supply chain and how does it scale to meet the needs of business? >> Yeah, Lisa, it's really an interesting design at Microsoft. When you look at all the products we service, from Xbox consoles, controllers, Xbox games, Xbox Live cards, service devices for retail customers, for consumer customers and commercial customers. And then the way we go to market through distributors, retailers, and direct to consumer homes, we have to have a supply chain that actually executes across all the products and customer needs based on seasonality. When you think about our products, Xbox console heavy Christmas, heavy consumer, heavy retail commercial devices for service, heavy quarter ends, heavy periods of time back to school. So, we have to have a supply chain that effectively works across all of our products, all of our customers, and all the differences analogies that we have to manage. >> And do so globally? >> And do so globally. >> So talk to me about the transformation. That's a word that we talk a lot about digital transformation, right? >> Yes. >> Before COVID, now we've seen the acceleration of digital transformation during COVID, we've seen challenges with the supply chain. Talk to me about Microsoft supply chain journey from a digitalization perspective, what you guys have gone through. >> Yeah, absolutely. Data is the key. And I have a philosophy which is around managing a business by facts and figures. And so, when Cassie first came on about a year and a half ago, our focus was on digitizing our supply chain. So how do you take our physical supply chain, digitize it in a way that you have a digital mapping and a duplication of what's happening physically in a digital way across the supply chain. So about every single day, we're grabbing in about 500 gigabytes of data, that then allows us to understand the physical and the virtual world of our supply chain, to understand how it's moving, how it's executing and how it's delivering. As for example, we were able to, when the war began in Ukraine, to understand where our trains were, how they were moving, and if they were continuing to move versus stopping. On the second side, we're leveraging that data now to make decisions about where our supply chain is today, which is really focused in the changing environments that are real time occurring. That's driving opportunities, whether it's about reducing carbon, whether it's driving cost down or whether it's servicing the customers to make real time decisions, while at the same time planning for three to five years out based on our growth, our projections, and making sure we'll have the right infrastructure partner supply chain in place to service with those changes in growth. >> Basically you need a crystal ball? >> Basically. >> Essentially? >> Yes. >> And Cassie, it sounds like from what Jonathan just said, you joined the team during the pandemic? >> Yes. >> So, during a time of massive change? >> Fully remote, yeah. Talk to me a little bit about that and some of the opportunities that you saw in helping the supply chain modernization. >> Yeah, definitely. So when I joined Microsoft, it's great time. And it's all the risks and challenges and dynamic changing environment that's really involved. So we spent a long time, like from the time I joined Microsoft, we spent the time to set up this digital chain of our supply chain. So really to transform what is happening physically to how do we see it digitally. So just to bring the visibility of the supply chain. So the great thing is we are able to leverage the tool from Coupa, the digital transformation and also supply chain design optimization tool to help us really build the digital twin, and also the model for Microsoft device supply chain. >> Now, interesting comment. So when I met Casie, the first time I met her, was in person when I interviewed her. Second time I met her in person was here at Coupa, and I was afraid I wouldn't recognize her. (all laughing) >> Of course, challenges of last year. Talk to me about speaking of challenges, talk to me about some of the challenges that Microsoft saw and said, "We need a partner like Coupa to help us eliminate these challenges. We don't have time. Real time is no longer nice to have. We've got to be able to transform, so we have that visibility in real time." >> Absolutely. When you think about time, time and decisions, overnight, cities get locked down in China, cities get locked down in Europe. And if you wait days or wait hours, that could be the difference between product on a boat, product on a plane, or product not arriving to support your customer needs. >> Right. And then the question is knowing that with that real time, how are you making decisions real time to change, to alternate airports? Making changes on the products you're making to make sure that, I was making this but now I should make this, because I have a risk of getting product to show. >> And you've got to do all that with very limited amount of time. And of course, cause there's the consumer. I mean, we think about the Microsoft on the business side but the consumer side, you mentioned some of the consumer products you don't offend the Xbox, the service consumers. One of the things that was really in short supply during the pandemic and probably still is to some degree, is patience. >> Yes. >> The consumer experience is so critical for a brand. >> Correct. >> And as is the employee experience. >> Yes. >> Talk to me a little bit about, from a supply chain digitization perspective, what was some of the executive sponsorships? Who were some of those executive sponsors that were involved in going, "Yeah, we need to move in this direction with Coupa, and it's got to be now."? >> The real supporter behind that is, my manager, Jeff Davidson, and then his leader, which is Donna Wharton, where they are truly about what are we doing next? How are we going to leverage the tools and the capabilities that are provided by others that allow us to do our job? So let's be clear on, let's use those that are designed to do what they're supposed to do, and then build where we need to. And that was the big difference, the digitization of the data, create the data, create the information so that we could then leverage the tools to create the information, right? And that information is then about bringing the facts, the information and the data forward, to have very fact-based conversations, which is back to manage the business by facts and figures. >> Right. Well, Cassie, one of the things that we've also learned in the last couple years, is that every company is a data company. If they're not a data company they're probably not going to be around. I even think of my grocery store and all that data that they have on me to be able to surface up. What did I buy last time, and I want to buy that again? Talk to me a little bit about why was Coupa the right choice to help facilitate this data strategy so that the visibility and the supply chain and the ability to tweak things on demand is there? >> Yeah. So, the main stuff that we are leveraging from Coupa are the data group and also the supply chain group. So data group enable us to really, for the people who do not have a intensive data manipulation backgrounds, they can use data group very straightfowardly to work on the data so they can build, they can grab the data transactional level and aggregate to the leadership level to see data in different aspects, tell the trends to get the key information. So that's the power of getting the massive data on a level that's like everybody can say, "Oh, wow! This is what it means." And another is definitely leveraging the data to get into a model, which is what we just talked about, the digital twin of our physical supply chain. So, we are able to like make analysis based on very easy design, like sensitive analysis, what-if analysis, to test out what our future supply chain can be. And what is the cost benefits? What is all the impacts on the on the lead times? On the carbons? So, yeah. So that's the power of leveraging the data. >> Speaking of carbons, how is Microsoft working towards being carbon negative, zero waste? What's some of the things that are going on there from a corporate responsibility perspective? >> Yeah, that's a really important one. As known about two years ago, we came out with a pledge to be carbon neutral by 2030. >> 2030. >> And so, the company as a whole is doing massive initiatives from different groups, but specifically in supply chain, we're constantly focusing on cutting our carbon footprint, whether it's the way we're making the products and designing the products, whether it's the way that we're designing our warehouses. So for example, just recently, we launched a Carbon Neutral DC in Europe, which is all solar panel based. We're about to do that as well in one of our US operations. We're working on other things that allow us to think about alternative pallets that eliminate the weight of wood, to a much lighter pallet that has a huge carbon reduction when you think about shipping things via the air and the carbon impact there. So, everything that we work on is really around three things; service, cost and sustainability. And our biggest objective is really taking all three of those objectives and trying to bring them closer to each other so that the decisions aren't as large against each other when you make one versus the other. That's our objective. So, how do we continue to move that ball forward, challenge the paradigms of the old, that we're so accustomed to and really move forward to changing? >> How does Coupa help with that? >> Oh, I can't say that, yeah. >> Yeah, so one of the actual dimensions, Microsoft our goal is to achieve carbon neutral by 2030. So traditionally, the trade off might be between cost and service, right? >> Okay. And now, the carbon is the most important priority. So the trade off, the balance, are between cost, service, time and carbon. So one of the great thing that Coupa can help us is in the network modeling. There is actually objective for lowering the carbon emissions. So that can be the top priority that you wanted to solve through your network modeling like in parallel to cost, to service. So you can just like very straightforwardly put more weight into carbon when you're making your decisions, like that can be a higher penalty cost when you have more carbon emissions. It's like a very straightforward way to translate the carbon goal into some quantifiable goal into the modeling and data. >> Jonathan, I'm curious from a Microsoft strategic partnership perspective, how important is it from Microsoft to partner with companies that have that strong commitment to help facilitate being carbon neutral by 2030, having a strong ESG initiative? >> It's critical. Microsoft for the most part is an outsourced supply chain in which we measure partners across the network. We have our partners run our distribution and centers, we have outsource manufacturing, we have outsourced logistics. And it's important that we're working with them about what their plans are, because they're just simply an extension of the Microsoft supply chain. >> Right. >> Right. They're not not just companies we work with, they're companies we partner with, to think about how can we change the future? What are the alternatives that we can do? How do we think about alternative fuels? How do we think about alternative shipping ways? How do we think about creating density in the network? So one of the biggest things when you really think about optimization is really around creating deensity. How do I create more with less, and make sure I'm taking, for every dollar spent, for every shipment made, I maximize it to its fullest, and leave no waste behind it? That's the goal. And so, partners challenging us is probably the most important piece because they're on the front line. They actually see our shipments, they see our loads, they see the work we're doing and how it's translating to their environment. And it's important that they give us that hard feedback back that allows us know where we're not meeting the bar. >> Got it. Cassie, you guys are giving a presentation in about a couple of hours. Talk to me about some of the things that the audience, like if you had to summarize the top three takeaways that the audience is going to learn from the top, what would they be? >> I think the first is sustainability. So we want everybody to know that this is the key mission for Microsoft. That's one of the priorities for the next eight years for Microsoft to achieve. And the second is just how Coupa can help us achieve that goal. And how do we leverage the the applications, the tools, the cutting edge technologies for us to achieve a sweet balance between sustainability and technology supplychain? >> I think one of the greatest things about conferences like this, is that Coupa is great with that customer centricity, is it the opportunity to hear from the voice of the customer? What challenges you had? Why you chose Coupa? How you resolved them? And that crystal ball that you talked about in terms of where we're going from here. I think that there's so much value. I'm sure in what you're going to share today with the audience. Jonathan, last question for you, for other folks in any industry that are about to embark on, or are in the midst of a supply chain, digital transformation, what's your advice? What recommendations would you give? >> For me, it's really about two things. First and foremost is about creating data. Focus on data, not an answer, not a conversation. What is the information that you require? And then the second piece about that is then how do you make sure you stitch it together? And how you create, whether it's manufacturing data, whether it's purchase order data, whether it's sales order data, whether it's shipment data, whatever it is, making sure that you can stitch end-to-end together, because each individual decision by itself, may be right, but could be wrong, because ultimately, it's about the decision for the whole, not the decision for the one. And then making sure you focus on the cultural change, which is around, it's just not my area, it's just not my thing, it's about the end, it's about the planet, it's about Microsoft, it's about the customer, it's about the future, and making sure you're really really focused on making that change, right? Not my change. >> Right, and Rob Bernstein even alluded to that a little bit this morning in his keynote talking about one of the things that Coupa breaks is silos. >> Yes. >> Organizations that, cause to your point, something might be really good for sales or operations, but not good for marketing or logistics, for example, need to be able to have that visibility across, but also another thing that Coupa is famous for is collaboration. >> Correct. >> Being able to enable that collaboration across lines of business, across teams, across partners. >> Yep. And an important statement of that is, when you think about change, think of it like a stream, right? Streams, they create pathways with persistence. When you believe in something and you're truly behind it, just stay the path, right? There'll be a time and a place, cause sometimes the decisions just aren't now, but they will become. There's a lot of things that, for example, myself and Cassie are constantly working on, that might not be right now, but they will be right in the future. And it takes sometimes, just the right opportunity, the right situation, but the key is making ysure you understand those things so when those opportunities present themselves, you can just step in. >> Yep. Another thing we've learned, I think in the last two years, I'm losing count, is it's not a matter of if, but when. >> Correct. >> And you can apply that general statement to pretty much anything these days. >> Absolutely. >> Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking about Microsoft's transformation of the supply chain, the digital twin that you've created. Have a great time in your session. I'm sure folks are going to learn a lot from you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, my pleasure. For Jonathan Allen and Cassie Wang, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the the CUBE's coverage of Coupa Insp!re 2022 from Las Vegas. Stick around, be right back with my next guest. (upbeat msuic)

>>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.

>>Hey guys, and gals. Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here at Coupa inspire 2022 with about 2,500 folks. Very excited to be back in person. I can assure you that is the vibe that is here to be. You joins me next to the managing director at KPMG Toby. It's great to have you on the program. >>Thanks. It's great to be here. >>Isn't it great to be back? I know it feels so normal. We were talking before we went live, that it feels normal. >>It does. It does. And it feels great. And after a great kickoff with, uh, with Rob >>Fantastic, Rob Bernstein has, and Barbara Corcoran, Rob has probably the highest energy of a CEO that I've ever gotten to work with. So you always know you're in for a good high energy conversation. Then Barbara Corcoran coming in, Jon Taffer with bar rescue is it's a, been a great morning so far. So you let's talk about you, you specialize in digital transformation within the procurement and the contract management spaces. Talk to me a little bit about that. >>Yeah, absolutely. You know, I, uh, I love helping folks to re-imagine their, uh, operating models to solve today's challenges. And there are so many challenges coming out in this post COVID world, um, that many of our clients are dealing with. And, and I'm never short on phone calls and, you know, uh, from, from my clients reaching out for help, um, to really figure out how to retool, um, and, and, and really help themselves to transform, to be able to address the, the, the changes to come. >>I heard a really smart description of the last two years today, compressed transformation. We've been talking about digital transformation for years, and then we've also been talking about it's acceleration during the COVID era, but the compressed transformation, I thought that's probably something that's here to stay. Nobody's going to want access to older, less data slower. >>Yep. >>They're just not >>A hundred percent. What >>Are some of the trends that you've observed in your role in the last couple of years? >>Yeah, I, I absolutely believe that folks that took advantage of that digital transformation pre pandemic have actually been able to fare much better than those that have held off on those investments. Um, for whatever reasons, you know, there are always different priorities, but those that have actually gotten that journey started, um, pre pandemic have definitely fared, uh, for, well, I think the trends that I'm seeing today, the CPO's challenge, um, and there are many challenges, um, but you know, the, you know, coming out of the, uh, post COVID era, you are now recovering and ramping up production as a result, your buying activities increasing, right. Um, and, and other ways other than increasing, um, activity. There's also the changing of requirements. So, you know, the folks in the front office are looking at new technologies to innovate new products and services, and that's going to change what the, the mix of the skills and resources that you need in the back office. >>Um, in addition to that, um, there are other requirements like ESG. And so as you're thinking about retooling and being able to, um, buy more sustainably or drive diversity, um, with the spend that you have, that's also changing the skill mix that you have. And I think on top of speak, uh, on top of that, um, the skills and the talent, we are dealing with the, a unfortunate situation that many companies are with the, uh, you know, the great resignation where the talent is, has as quickly exited the workforce. Um, and, uh, and, and with the demand increasing and changing, that puts everyone in a tough spot. And so those are really the big challenges that I've seen with the clients. Most recently, as we're coming out of COVID >>Of your customer conversations, escalated up the C-suite you talk, you mentioned the chief procurement officer. If we think of every company, these days has to be a data company to be successful. If they're not, they're probably not going to be around. Are you noticing that from a supply chain perspective within procurement and contract management, is that escalating the C-suite to be much more of a C-suite or board level initiative? >>Absolutely. Absolutely. I think what folks have realized in many of their, even the earlier digital transformation efforts, it was very geared around automating and streamlining transactions and processes, not so much putting data at the core. Yes, you would get intelligence out of that, but we hadn't architected your entire organization around data and good quality data and what is needed, um, to be able to actually translate that data to meaningful insights, to make the decisions or drive, um, visibility within to your, into your supply chain. Um, so when you think about things that are, um, such as ESG, where you really need to know, um, your tier one, tier two tier three suppliers, and all the impacts that that has, um, in order to drive to those, um, ESG objectives that you're telling your investors, you're telling your customers, and you're telling your, um, your employees about it's very important. You have to be centered around data and be able to be able to see their entire supply chain. And if you weren't, if you weren't architected to do so, doing it as an afterthought is very costly because you've already made those investments >>Very costly. And also, I mean, from a business perspective, I think, you know, we, we talk so often Toby and you probably do as well about it, business alignment. It's one of those, it's like digital transformation. It's almost a buzzword if you will, but it's critical because I'm seeing a lot of data and research from, from folks like Gardner that are showing that massive percentages of businesses believe that the technology is really the driver and the fuel of the business going forward. So no longer can it and lines of business be separated. >>Yeah, I, I totally agree. I actually think that when I mentioned about new skills, if you think about the next generation and the new operating models, um, uh, you know, the, the, the new folks coming out of college have to have that skill set because process and technology are, are, are completely linked. Um, and I think that the organizations, the future and the sick, the most successful ones will know how to actually be more human centric and be able to harness the data through the technologies. So I'll actually allow you and I to do what we do best, right, which is collaborate and negotiate deals work on our relationship versus focused on the technology or entering data into forms and all the administrative components that, uh, many of my clients are plagued with today, >>Collaboration, I think has maybe become even more important in the last two years that we've been so limited about how to collaborate. Thankfully, we have a lot of technologies to do that, but when I think of Coupa collaboration, community are two words that jump out. Talk to me a little bit about from an, a partnership perspective alignment there with the collaborative spirit at KPMG. >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, you know, for, for us, uh, I recently just presented on a very similar topic that nothing great in business is done by a single person. And it takes partners to be able to drive the innovation needed to solve the new challenges of tomorrow. And, and I see our relationship with that. You know, they offer a platform, they offer a method to get access to the data and simplify it in a way for our clients so that they can focus on the relationships and driving the collaboration with their suppliers. And, and I think that that's, that's the thought leadership, uh, in partnership with, uh, with them that we'd like to bring to the table. >>Speaking of alignment between KPMG and Qubit. Talk to me a little bit about ESG as, as sort of a new initiative within KPMG. Talk to me a little bit about that. And what's some of the high level objectives are >>Absolutely. Um, I wouldn't say that it's, it's, it's new. I think it's always been there and there's always been a focus, but I think the recent events and with the regulatory environment changing as well, and as with consumers, consumer behavior, driving and investor community driving towards, um, uh, ESG, I think that is quickly changing how companies are prioritizing that within the Mo amongst everything else that they have. And as a result, I think the CPO's role in that equation is ever so important when it comes to delivering and operationalizing ESG. >>I imagine it, the CPS role must be a lot more strategic these >>Days >>Because they really have to be kind of a transformation change agent. >>Yeah. And actually in most cases, the CPO is perfect for that because that's been their role, um, in, uh, in, in, uh, in many cases before. Um, and I think, yeah, this is just yet another dimension that they didn't have to attack and, and incorporate into the, uh, into the process of selecting the right partner or the right supplier within their, um, within the, uh, with, with who they want to onboard for, for the company. >>Got it. Okay. Let's talk about advice now for companies that are either in the early stages of the supply chain transformation really digitizing, how do they get started? Is it too late for some? >>No, I don't think it's ever too late. I don't think, I, I think, um, I don't think it's too late, you know, and especially with the very big focus on digital and tech these days, sometimes being the late, being late to the game allows folks to actually work out the kinks for, you know, the bleeding edge technologies. And so that makes it even less risky for them to adopt in, in many cases. Um, that's, that's, uh, that, that's what we've seen, but, you know, I think the advice is get educated, uh, really just understand as much as you can around what other people are doing. Are there other, um, uh, peer group, uh, companies like yours, you know, like themselves that are actually going through the transformation or have gone before and just kind of understand what were the drivers of that strategy and what were the outcomes that you can learn from them, get help from externals. >>Um, and whether they be technology partners, consultants, and actually hiring new skills and bringing in new perspectives to help you to own and drive that strategy important. This is super important and you can't outsource these things, right. This needs to come from within, especially when you think about things as purposeful and impactful as ESG. Um, those, those cannot be outsourced. Um, and I think those would be the, uh, the kind of the two key things. Um, but I always also say, um, take an outward in approach, as you're thinking about your new strategy, focus on what your employees are saying about, you know, your supply chain and how easy it is to actually understand and, and work within your supply chain. Talk to your suppliers, talk to your internal business partners, to really reflect and understand how do you make this process as easy as possible for them to comply with. >>I think one of the things I was reading, uh, in preparation for coming here is that some, some survey, a survey that that Cooper did of about 800 decision makers. And one of the things that was overwhelming as a theme is that a lot of organizations don't feel that they have the right data visibility to drive an ESG strategic initiative. So what Coupa does providing that visibility and the ability to collaborate and share across the community is, seems to be something that's going to be a business critical must have going forward. >>Yeah, a hundred percent, you know, many, uh, many of our clients operate under, you know, uh, not under like mandates or compliance, driven, um, kind of policies in the commercial world, many cases you have to influence the buying behavior. And so you can't do that without data. I'd like to think in this day and age presented with the right supplier options with them at the right point in time, you're able to influence and drive the spend to diverse candidates, sustainable options, you know, and there's, you know, not just savings, not just the lowest cost option, but there's so many other things to consider in this day and age. And I think that's where it's so important to be able to have a platform like Hoopa, to be able to gather that data acquire external sources of data, such as ESG related data and make that to, um, to, to all parties, um, and be that source of truth so that you can drive the >>Here's some truth. And also even something that was talked about this morning during the keynote is accountability. And have you heard Jon Taffer from bar rescue talking this morning, but he was talking about an 120 bar rescues. He goes, I've never met one person that has admitted from day one of the four days. They shoot that I'm responsible for the reason that my business is not successful. He goes, everybody has an excuse. There's no accountability until you really force someone to take probably that hard look in the mirror that they don't want to take, but that accountability within organizations within an overall business is critical. >>Yeah, I think, uh, I absolutely believe that went away to solve that is providing the data and making it available. And, um, and really once again, I think it goes back to driving that behavior that you want. And I think it starts with, uh, with, with leadership and I think the accountability, accountability of leadership, and to be able to drive that type of culture within your organization. Um, but absolutely you need data to be able to do that and, and be able to monitor that as well, you know, as a leader to make sure that that accountability is appropriately distributed. >>Right. But one of the things, I mean, I think patients has been in short supply the last two years have been, we've learned that. I think also that another thing we've learned is that access to real-time data is no longer, oh, then that would be great. It's you've got to have that for your business to be differentiated because the, you know, if we think about the consumer side, the consumers are so vocal on things like social media, if the experience isn't tailored, personalized and instantaneous, We have a very short Rob talked about the very short attention span that his kids have. I'm like three minutes. We don't even have that in business or on the consumer side. I don't think. >>Yeah, I, yeah, I see that in my kids and what he said today was, was spot on. Um, so, you know, when I think about my career and where I'm at, and he said the same thing, I mean, our kids are coming into the, there'll be in procurement organizations very soon, sooner than, you know, then, then I like to admit. Um, and as a result, I think that, um, we talked a bit about talent shortage and the challenge with keeping talent. And I think that what you had just expressed is very important is that that experience for the employee, but you come into a workforce and they expect you to have these quick turnarounds, but you've, you offered them tools that require spreadsheets and old archaic systems to be able to solve today's challenges. I think that you're not going to be able to retain your talent right along. Right. >>That's a great point. That's an absolutely fantastic point. Last question for you before we wrap here is so the changes that organizations need to make with respect to being prepared for ESG reporting requirements that are coming down the pike, obviously being, having a data strategy has got to be one of us. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think, um, I think we, many procurement organizations were really geared around savings and a very compliance, driven manner. And when you think about ESG, I think you gotta be very data-driven. Um, and so that should be a priority focus of how do you retool yourself to be able to acquire mass amounts of data, figuring out where you need to go, um, to get that data, whether they be third parties, whether they be directly from the supplier, um, and be able to aggregate it and provide the insight into those reporting standards that are required. Um, and then to be able to actually measure progress along those sustainability or diversity goals that it might be established at, at, at the leadership level. So I think it's coming down the pike. It's a matter of time. I think it's, I think it's, uh, you know, it's something that I've been waiting for to see. Um, and it's interesting to see how, uh, how quickly that it's, it's come down. Um, but I think with the regulatory compliance coming down, um, this is going to be moving very quick and people need to get ready. >>That's good. They need to be ready. Excellent to be thank you for joining me on the program today, talking about what you were doing at KPMG, what it's doing with Kupa and how organizations really should be thinking about and approaching supply chain, digital transformation. We appreciate your insights. >>Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. All >>Right. For Toby, you I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube in Las Vegas at Cooper inspire 2022 stick around. My next guest will join me shortly.

(soft bright music) (logo swooshing) (crowd murmuring) >> Hey everyone, welcome to Las Vegas! Lisa Martin here on the ground with theCUBE about Coupa Inspire 2022. And can you hear the buzz behind me? It is so great to be in person. Nick Banich joins me, the Chief Revenue Officer and Global Partnership Manager for the Coupa Alliance at Miebach Consulting. Nick, it's great to have you on the program. >> Thanks for having me, Lisa. First time here at Inspire and it's exciting. >> Is it exciting? It's great to see this room packed. >> It is! It feels, like, the pandemic is finally- >> It does. >> Maybe behind us. >> Right, fingers crossed. (Nick chuckles) So talk to us a little bit about Miebach Consulting and a little bit about the Coupa Partnership, so the audience gets that understanding of what you guys do. >> Yeah, guess, we're kind of new to the Coupa ecosystem. You could say, we came as part of the acquisition of LLamasoft. So Miebach is a supply chain focus, advisory, consultancy, engineering firm. So we have three different business lines. Supply chain strategy, where we do things like supply chain design and the Coupa platform, planning, inventory, engineering, automation studies, and distribution centers, with the labor crunch that we're facing right now. As well as we have a digital transformation group that works on getting the decision-making as a supply chain industry into the digital realm and away from Microsoft Excel. >> Let's talk about the digitization of the supply chain. You know, one of the things that we've seen in the last couple of years is this massive acceleration to digital because businesses in every industry had no choice. But where are, what are the current trends from a digital supply chain perspective? >> You know, I think the, kind of the integration of the compression of the decision-making cycle has really gotten companies to not look at strategic decisions then operational decisions and tactical decisions in execution. That all has to be compressed now with the volatility we've all been exposed to. I mean, basically, for the past 20 years, we took the supply chain and turned it into a Swiss watch. It was very long, very well orchestrated. But with the volatility, with labor issues, with the land war in Europe, this volatility and change is requiring companies to be much more adaptive. And they've had to compress that decision cycle down and the Coupa platform, certainly, from a supply chain standpoint, absolutely helps infuse that process to shorten time from question to answer and allow you to address strategic and tactical topics in parallel to one another and not kind of waterfall down over the decision making product. >> That's important, 'cause these days, there is no time for waterfalls. So let's unpack the Coupa supply chain design platform. Talk to me about it, what it does and how it is helping that acceleration? >> Yeah, so it's incredibly powerful. And what it allows you to do is create that digital representation. We can take a three dimensional world and put it into a two dimensional linear program. And within the same platform we can optimize strategically and take a look at end to end type of supply chain decisions, nearshoring, onshoring, supplier diversification, and risk aspects. We can look at it more operationally. We're actually looking at which manufacturing plans should make what? What distribution centers should serve what customers? How do I segment my products? How do I segment my customers? Then within the same modules, you can use and go to your inventory optimization, not only optimize inventory, but also simulate it, which gives you phenomenal power in a world where there is so much uncertainty. You can apply risk in those questions of what if, so you're ready. So that way, when the thing happens, you're not that scrambling to have analysts crunch Excel files to see what do you do to normalize inventory levels or normalize your supplier base. You're able to be more proactive with the predictive and prescriptive analytics that the full suite provides for you. >> That is essential. If that's one of the lessons we've learned in the last couple of years, not if, but when. >> Nick: Yes. >> Talk to me about customers that are using the platform. What are some of the, using it well. What are some of the things that they have in common? >> You know, I think the organizations that are implementing it well, look for it. They view it as a real platform. You know, historically, supply chain design, network optimization, was seen as a tool, and companies implement it as a tool. You purchase licenses, you assign a couple of people to work on it from your analytical department and you just went with it. This is a very powerful platform to completely revolutionize how you make decisions within your supply chain. And you need to approach it the same way you approach a new warehouse management system, a new planning platform, a new labor management system, the change management aspects, the organizational aspects, the education of stakeholders on what is this, demystifying it. So it's not a black box and everybody knows what it can and should do and how best to utilize it. So those organizations that view it as more than a distribution network tool, "Hey, where do I put my new warehouse? Hey, this lease is coming up in Central Europe. It's coming up in Ohio. Do I extend the lease? Do I need to move?" That's, like, a level zero maturity on our maturity graph. The very mature companies are using it and infusing it both strategically, operational, technically, and are using it for distribution decisions, transportation decisions around mode selection, production footprint decisions. You have the capability to have a digital twin. And by having, the other thing companies struggle with is, they just build one model. >> Uh-hmm. >> I start out, I buy the product. You know, I get it built in, I move everything to the cloud and then I do a distribution solve for the U.S. And then the European group says, "Hey, that was great. That was insightful. Can we do the same thing in Europe?" And you take that model and then you add Europe into it. And then the production group says, "Hey, you know, we're thinking about changing some of our make-buy decisions. Can you model what the effect would be on total cost if we did do some nearshoring?" And all of a sudden, you turn your one model that you had built for a specific purpose into this Christmas tree where everybody's hanging their ornaments. And what you really need to do is having a modeling strategy. What type, you should have a volume, a portfolio of models you can pull from and say, "Hey, here's our strategic end to end model. Hey, here's our tactical Asian production models. Hey, here's our total landed cost for top 15% of our customers." And having that set of models, so you have right models, the right questions. >> Uh-hmm. >> That's what the companies that are really scaling this and really excelling. And you'll notice a pattern. The companies that are excelling that have the Coupa platform, typically, you'll find them on list, like, Gartner's Top 25 and things along those lines. Because it is a very powerful platform when you unlock the art of the possible with it. >> Sounds, like, those are companies that are very innovative. But where does the company, that maybe isn't there yet? How do they start? 'Cause it sounds, like, there's a tremendous wealth of potential and opportunities that the technology can deliver. Do they have to start with executive buy-in? What do you see as kind of, like, some of those early steps? >> This is a change management exercise from the very beginning. So creating that sense of urgency, creating your powerful coalition. You have to start with that. If you view this as, "Hey, we're going to have a tool, we're going to use this once, and then our supply chain's fixed for the next 10 years." I mean, I think most leaders are realizing that those days are long gone. That supply chain design has to be a continual topic at the top levels. You know, supply chain is on the lips of every politician and every (chuckles) board member right now. So this is a wonderful moment for those supply chain leaders that have wanted to infuse a greater level of digital decision-making. This is the perfect opportunity. You can get buy-in, like, you never had before. Your CFO is probably analyzing labor inflation, fuel inflation rates, disruptions on supply base, and you're probably having to deal with more pressure out of the CFO and its department than you ever had to in the past. We see it with our clients. The pressure is on with those leaders. And this allows you to very quickly be much more holistic in that decision-making. You're not relying on how good was the analyst, that made this Excel file that told you to open up this plan, move this distribution center, serve this customer base in this way. It's not based on how that data looks and how good that analyst was, you're infusing an entire practice into your organization. >> That's critical, because every company these days is a data company. If they're not, they're not going to be around. It's about the ability to have visibility extract the value from the data to make those data-driven decisions, because we don't have time. We heard a lot about that from a real-time perspective and the keynote this morning that's table stakes run any organization. >> Yeah, and with the move of the platform to the cloud, as part of the Coupa ecosystem, with the DDM, with the rapid model builder, and all those things that come along with it, it will significantly squash the amount out of time you have from question to answer. Because the first time you do this, it probably takes four months. And of that four months to ask that question, and get an answer, build your model, you know, replicate the 3D world in that 2D environment. Over half of that time is spent on cleaning data, building the baseline model, aligning with finance, they peanut butter spread certain aspects of cost onto the onto SKUs and really getting correct cost allocations for A, B, and C SKUs. You spend half your time just playing around with your data to get the model to work right now. Once you add that model, next time, question and answer infinitely quicker. But you have to have a good data strategy. You have to have the right data architecture. If you don't have that specific to supply chain, leaders really need to get on that. Because what we see a lot of times is organizations will have an enterprise data strategy. >> Uh-hmm. >> And they're going to build a data warehouse or a data lake, you know, whatever, I'm a consultant, so I'm also guilty of the buzz words. But, we kind of call it the supply chain data plan. You don't need to wait for the whole enterprise to get ready to have all of your data sorted out in a single instance, homogenize. Start collecting that supply chain data, have a data strategy around it. So that way, you can start replicating these things then you can feed it back into the enterprise data strategy. But you have to get your data right. It's the old adage garbage in garbage out. >> Right. >> It's still true to this day. No matter how powerful the analytical tools are, we're infusing machine learning, artificial intelligence into some of the solves in the platform. But if you don't have that good data, you're going to struggle. So that's a key piece to it, getting that executive buy-in and having that right data strategy will set you on a much smoother path to success than if you don't do those things. >> Right, the data strategy is critical. If not, one of the biggest competitive differentiators these days. Where is the chief data officer, the chief digital officer, the chief information officer, in these conversations that Miebach is having with customers? >> Too often, not at the forefront enough. >> Lisa: Really? >> Those clients that have that group, have that organization, and they have influencing power, those programs go much quicker, much simpler. The rate of adoption, the scalability of the program. All of a sudden, you're not thinking about, "What am I going to do with one or two analysts interacting with the product?" You're now developing apps. You have your planners interfacing with it. You have capacity managers interacting with the digital model. Those that don't have that, do have much more impetus, because it's always the adage of, "Oh, IT, what do we do? And our data's a mess. We have this data program and our IT resources are super constrained." So you have to bring those people to the table. You have to have them part of the conversation, 'cause they can be an incredible enabler if you bring them and get them bought in. >> That's a great point of those enablers. And especially, given the fact that nobody has extra time to waste here. This is a, everything is so fast moving. You mentioned supply chain being on the lips of every politician. Everybody's lips, everybody's expecting some delivery that is delayed for whatever reason. >> I mean, 12 years ago when I started with the firm, and people, "Oh, what does the firm do?" I'm like, "Oh we're a global supply chain consultancy." And they're like, "What?" >> Yeah. (laughs) >> You know, now everybody knows. And they're like, "Oh, yeah!" It's amazing that the revolution, I mean, the pandemic has been incredibly unfortunate with all the hardships and deaths and everything and still dealing with hotspots and things. I think it did bring supply chain, supply chain was struggling for a while to get a seat at the table. Organizations started having chief supply chain officers. You know, that was a new thing not that long ago. This has brought table stakes to the supply chain organization. My challenge back to us is what do we do with this now? >> Right. >> For years, as an industry, we've asked to be at the table, we're here now, spotlight's on us. It's time for us to deliver. Things like the Coupa platform are an incredible enabler of that. But you got to get it right when you roll it out. >> The spotlight's on you, but there's also a skill shortage. Talk to me about that. I just saw you do a big sigh. How can Miebach and Coupa with this platform help to mitigate some of the supply chain skills gap that organizations in every industry are facing? >> You know, it really comes down to the human element and when people talk a lot about sustainability, they talk about environmental conditions. There's a human sustainability topic we have to cover. Nobody likes being assigned to be a data analyst on a transformational project. And you're crunching Excel spreadsheets and running it sequel coding. No, no, that's not an enjoyable fulfilling task for many people. >> Lisa: No. >> There are special people that it is, and God bless (chuckles) them. So with things, like, the apps, with things, like, building out, so that way, we can take the people that you do have and have them making decisions, driving discussions around the insights the platform's giving versus just crunching numbers and building models. This is where you're going to have a much higher retainment. People are going to be excited about the job. They're going to have fun at the job because you do see a turnover of organizations that don't get the data strategy right, that people don't like being in a supply chain center of excellence in perpetuity. Again, there are certain people that are, but a lot of times, once the people get this analytical insight to how strategically the design of the company is set up, business units will grab them and give them a significant role. And then you're continually churning and replacing your COE talent. So having a talent strategy for your COE and having a strategy of how you're going to leverage, you know, we're in a world where my first grader's are learning coding, right? Like, you need to have a data strategy. So that way, that becomes your people strategy as well. And too many times, people think, "Hey, I buy the platform. I need a project strategy. What are the projects we're going to do?" And not often enough, do they talk about the people element of it to really make this work. And it absolutely has to be part of the discussion as you're setting up your center of excellence, it's people, it's processes and it's technology. >> Absolutely! >> You got to bring those three together or you real struggle a bit. >> You do. And then change management is not an easy thing to do for anybody. But one of the things you talked about, this is the pandemic as an accelerator of getting the supply chain folks to the table, being able to accelerate, getting data into the hands of people that can actually take in clean insights and make decisions based on that. So if you look into a crystal ball, what's the future of supply chain design? Where is it going? >> I believe we're going to see a lot more of movement towards applications and infusing of artificial intelligence and machine learning. It's there. It's ready to go. What a lot of companies are lacking and it goes back to what we already talked about is the data piece of it. I mean, we have been developing algorithms in a machine learning environment for three, four years now. It goes back to garbage in, and garbage out. So I think it's going to be a big element of supply chain talent, securing that, figuring out with robotic product process automation and things like that. How do you take non-value added work so you can take the talent you do have and give them more fulfilling work? I think companies are going to need to have data strategies and all that unlocks applications and things. So you can democratize, right? You have this digital twin in the cloud. How many people within the organization cross-functionally have questions about the supply chain? >> Right. >> What if this happens? What if that happens? Hey, if we do this, what does it effect upstream downstream? >> Right. >> So once you build that cloud, develop the applications that allow the entire enterprise to interface with this digital representation to play around and see what the effect is to then make better, more informed, more holistic decisions, drive more conversational, cross functionally amongst leaders, and even below the top leadership level. I think this is really where we're going to go and the companies that don't just survive, but thrive in this new normal, whatever that's going to be, is going to be the companies that get that right. >> They have to embrace that. There's no doubt. >> Nick: Have to embrace it. >> Nick, it's been great having you on the program, talking about supply chain, what's going on there, the accelerators, but also the opportunities. Thank you so much for sharing your insights. >> I appreciate the opportunity. So it's been a great conversation. I look forward to the rest of the event! >> I agree. For Nick Banich, I'm Lisa Martin on the ground in Las Vegas at Coupa Inspire 2022. Stick around, I'll be back with my next guest shortly. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Coupa Inspire 2022. We are in Las Vegas at the beautiful Cosmopolitan hotel. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Brian McKillips joins me next, a managing director at Accenture. Brian, it's great to have you on the program. >> Thanks for having me, I'm glad to be here. >> So you have an interesting, you lead a lot of stuff at Accenture and I want to read this off, so I get it right. You lead the intelligent platform services strategy and the industry and functions platform group. Talk to me about those responsibilities. >> Yeah, so the intelligent platform services is the place in the business where we have kind of our large software partners, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Workday, Salesforce and Adobe. And we kind of think of ourselves as kind of the engine that powers industry and functional solutions, right? And the way Accenture's gone to market over the last couple of years has been kind of bringing together our breadth of experience all the way from strategy, all the way through operations and these big technology transformations are at the core of that. So that's what we do in intelligent platform services. And we recently launched this what we call the industry and functions platforms group because we realized there's a lot of strategic partners that are critical for us to be have a strong practice around, COUPA being one of them, you know in the supply chain and sourcing and procurement space so that we could create a home to be able to deliver these solutions globally and at scale. So I lead both kind of the strategy across all of IPS and then the new industry and functions platform group. >> Got it. All right. So you're here to talk to me about composable technology. First of all, define that for the audience so they understand what you're talking about. >> Yeah, you bet. So, you know, at Accenture, we're talking a lot about this is the age of compressed transformation, meaning, you know, change is only going to speed up and the need to change and so our clients are really struggling with not only kind of moving fast but that pressure around having to change as dynamics around the world change. So in the age of compressed transformation, we were really talking about how our clients should be kind of reorienting the way they think about their tech stack. And because, you know, historically a lot of us grew up in kind of monolithic implementations with, you know one software provider. But today it's really about composing technology to create new industry, new ways to solve industry problems, functional processes, customer experiences, right? And so composable technology we think about it in three parts. One is a cloud foundation that is, you know, the hyperscalers are a critical part of that. Secondly, our digital core and these are the kind of the historic software packages at the center of a lot of the industry and functional business processes. So you think about SAP and Oracle and Salesforce and things like that. But then around that digital core you have composable elements to be able to plug in. And that could be things like other software packages but it's also kind of industry IP or you know, edge devices, you know think IOT, think smart appliances, think and when you put, pull all those things together you need to be able to not only configure it once but configure and reconfigure as the dynamics of the marketplace change. >> So composable technology isn't necessarily new but has the pandemic been an accelerator of some of the things that you're seeing now in terms of why it's important, what's different about it now as being a foundation for competitive differentiation? >> Yeah, for sure. And it's, you know, I, anybody who's in technology say, you know, you tell them about this idea, they're like, well this isn't new, we've had service oriented architectures for 20 years. >> Right. >> You know, we've been talking about integrating things forever, but the you know, much like we all five to seven years ago we knew that we'd be using our phones to pay for pretty much everything but the tech hadn't caught up, right. Not every restaurant or store that you went to had the point of sale set up, right. So we all kind of knew that was coming. And the same thing has kind of happened around this idea of about composable technology and the three things that are new are one is that the cloud foundation is here, right. >> Yes. >> Where, you know, you now have not only kind of hyperscale high speed compute in at the core you actually have at the edge as well. And the same thing with high speed network, you know you have Starlink, you have 5G rolling out. So you have that cloud foundation that really wasn't there before. The second thing that's happening is the posture of a lot of the ecosystem, major ecosystem players has changed, right. And this started, you know when Satya Nadella took over Microsoft where Microsoft was very much a kind of a closed environment. >> Right. >> Where Satya under his leadership has really kind of changed the posture of being able to integrate into that. And we've seen that really pretty much across the entire landscape. And then lastly, it's become, you know, cheaper and, you know, quicker to be able to integrate with platforms like MuleSoft and others where there's kind of full scale integration platforms. So those are, those are the kind of the things that are new that allows for composable technology to be here in the real world. >> So it's something that's tangible, it's real organizations need to be on this bandwagon I imagine or they're going to be left behind. Gartner had some interesting stats that your team sent over and they were talking about these stats that were very compelling in terms of a seismic shift which always, you hear seismic living in California I think earthquakes, but something substantial. And they said, this seismic shift is going to happen by 2023. And I thought, hang on, that's less than a year away. >> Yeah. >> And they talked about by 2023, organizations that have adopted an intelligent composable approach will outpace competition 80% in the speed of new feature implementation. So if an organization hasn't started on that now is it too late? >> I would say not necessarily too late but they need to look for ways to change their disposition, right. And one of the ways that we've been helping clients do this is through pre-integrated solutions, right. So you know, in the past, the motion would be we would work with a client, they would work with our kind of strategists and consultants and say, what does the the future of supply chain look like for example. And if the client liked it, they would say, okay, I love it, what do I do next? Right. Then there would be another consulting engagement, another consulting engagement and then there would be a blueprint and architecture and at some point there was an implementation and a run. We've actually said we're investing heavily with our ecosystem partners to be able to pre-integrate solutions. So when that supply chain strategist says this is what the post COVID supply chain should look like and the client says, I love it what do I do next, that strategist can turn around and say, well, we've got a pre-integrated solution with SAP at the core sitting on a Microsoft Azure stack integrated with Coupa, wrapped with AI and machine learning and we can drop that and configure it for an environment. So that's how we're working with clients who are in that position that really need to kind of change their disposition is to bring these pre-integrated solutions and drop them in. >> Where are your conversations at the C- Suite level? Because this is, I hear many things in what you just said. Part of it is change management, which is very challenging. There's, people are very resistant to that. >> Brian: Yeah. >> One of the things that we've learned in the last two years is if it's going to come it's going to come but where are your conversations within that executive suite in terms of getting buy-in and going this is the direction we have to go in. >> Brian: Yeah. >> Because our business needs to be not just survive but thrive. >> Yeah. Yeah. These are, I mean, there are certainly of course in kind of traditional channels of tech whether it's, you know, the CIO or the CTO, but increasingly we're seeing this is a CEO discussion and, you know, our CEO Julie Sweet, is very, very market pacing and is having top to top conversations talking about compressed transformation, talking about composable technology because it's no longer just a, you know, a back office function as you know, right. I mean, this is really core to how companies you know, are, change their business models, make money, right. And it's a constant evolution. And that's why we talk about that kind of configuring and reconfiguring, it's not just coming in, implementing once, run it for five years and then when it's time to upgrade, we come back. >> No. >> We really want to be the partner with our clients to basically move in and, you know, across the patch whether it's specific industry processes, specific functional processes, specific customer experiences, we want to be the partner that is constantly tuning and configuring and reconfiguring and composing these solutions from across the ecosystem. >> And helping those businesses in any industry evolve as you talked about this compressed timeline, compressed transformation, such an interesting way of describing it but it's really true, it's what we've been living the last couple of years. >> Brian: Yeah. And so I want to get into Accenture's technology vision. You touched on this a little bit but there was some stats that your team provided that I thought were really, really interesting, a survey that Accenture did, 77% of executives, and we were just talking about the C-suite, state that their tech architecture is becoming critical to the overall success of the organization. So that awareness is there for sure en masse. Another thing that, stat that was interesting was 90% of business and IT execs agree that to be agile we always talk about agility, right, be resilient, organizations need to fast forward this digital transformation at the core. There's that compressed transformation. >> Brian: Yeah. >> Those are very high numbers. >> Brian: Yeah. >> In terms of where organizations say we see where we need to be. What's the vision at Accenture to help organizations get there fast? >> Yeah. Well, I think it's, you know, the thing that came to mind as you were talking is that we have, you know, major clients that have had this had in the, you know consumer packaged goods and apparel space that have had one way that they've done business is directly through retailers, you know, for pretty much their whole existence. Suddenly they need to shift to a direct to consumer model both in terms of marketing, in terms of commerce and that's not, you know, you don't just flip a switch in the back office and, you know, call IT and say hey, hey, can you change around a few things? It's actually shifting the entire core, it touches everything, it touches point of sale, it touches the customer experience, it touches supply chain, it touches employee experience even, right. >> Yeah. >> And so that's why I think it's so important for, you know technology leaders and business leaders to continue to kind of integrate themselves more tightly. >> Yes. >> To be able to make these business model transformations not just, you know, the tech that supports things. >> It's essential. >> Yeah. >> You know, we often in so many shows, Brian, we talk about alignment of business and technology, but it's not trivial. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's absolutely fundamental to the success of every organization. And they've got to do so and as you said, I'm going to use your, your word, the compressed transformation. >> Yeah. >> A compressed timeframe. So talk to me about some customer examples where you really feel that Accenture and Coupa have helped this organization transform its supply chain to be able to be, use composable technology. >> Brian: Yeah. >> To be a leader in its industry. >> Yeah. Well, one example of that is a major industrial client that we have that has global operations across the world. And they're on a journey to kind of upgrade their digital core ERP that they've been on for a long time. And that's a multi-year journey. But at, you know, today they have needs for sourcing and procurement solutions in specific geographies around the world like Japan, for example. So what we've been able to do and it's a relatively simple example but quickly work with the client and Coupa to identify the right Coupa solution that's born in the cloud that has a great kind of user experience and implement that quickly as well as integrated it into the digital core, right. So they're not separate things. And it becomes part of that architecture, right. It just starts to kind of show the flexibility of when you have, when you come with a kind of composable technology point of view, the way we can help our clients do that. And in some other cases it's even more, you know, more cutting edge. So think about a utilities client, for example that has IOT sensors on their wires and when the, when that wire swings too far they say something's wrong. Automatically it goes back to the digital core cuts a ticket and finds the closest worker. >> Lisa: Okay. >> To then dispatch. The worker then can put on their hollow lens, for example and climb the pole and get directions on how to solve the problem right then and there, right? That's another example of you know, multiple systems, edge devices things coming together in order to create that. And it's only going to get faster, you know, with the metaverse. >> Lisa: Right. >> You know, with web 3.0 coming, with blockchain becoming more and more mainstream, companies need to be thinking about in this age of compressed transformation how to do that composable technology that you can figure and reconfigure. >> Do you think that we're in an age of compressed transformation or is that how it's going to be going forward given the global climate the last two years? >> Yeah. It's definitely going to be that way going forward over the next, you know, probably for the large part of the, the remainder of our career. I mean, we're, our CTO, Paul Daugherty, talks about us being an mega cycle, right? There's so many things changing. And even without these externalities of, you know, political issues and pandemics, you know, the introduction of AI and machine learning, a lot of these technologies I just mentioned, it's, the change is happening in every industry, in every, you know kind of area of the marketplace and in a way that's, you know, that's really exciting, right. And we get to help our clients be able to kind of solve those things not just once, but continually >> There's a tremendous amount of opportunity that's come from compressed transformation, right. A lot of opportunity, a lot of potential. What are some of the things that you're looking forward to say in the next year, as we talked about some of those business and lines of business and IT folks understand we've got to move in this direction. What excites you about the potential that you have to help these organizations really transform? >> Yeah, well, I think, I mean, the, we just came out with our new tech vision which is about the metaverse. And I think that the things that excite me are there's brand new ways like we've lived in a world where transactions take place in a very predictable way with local currencies through a single channel. And that was, that's been sort of fixed for a long time. The fundamentals of the economy or actually in the marketplace are starting to change in terms of how do we transact with things like cryptocurrencies, things like non fungible tokens, you know, all these things that we didn't, you know, they weren't, even the metaverse these were not main line words, even six you know, months ago, 12 months ago. >> Lisa: Right, right. >> Now these things, you know, every it seems like every month there's something new that is, you know, seismic to use your word that is shifting the fundamentals of the marketplace. And I think that's what's really exciting. I mean, that's where, I mean, it's probably one of the most exciting times to be in business, be in the marketplace. It certainly has a lot of challenges. >> Lisa: Yes. >> But, you know, I think we're really about using, you know, the promise of technology to unlock human ingenuity and this is a great time to be able to unlock that human ingenuity. >> And that's such a great alignment with Coupa. I was just in the keynote and there was an Accenture video, Julie Sweet was talking to some other folks about that. Great alignment in the partnership. Brian, thank you for joining me talking about composable technology, what's new, why and the potential that organizations and every business have to use it to unlock competitive advantages. >> Brian: Yeah. >> We appreciate your insights and your time. >> You bet. Pleasure to be here. >> All right. With Brian McKillips, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBEe from Coupa Inspire 2022. (upbeat music)

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante by the dip has been been an effective strategy since the market bottomed in early march last year the approach has been especially successful in tech and even more so for those tech names that one were well positioned for the forced march to digital i sometimes call it i.e remote work online commerce data centric platforms and certain cyber security plays and two already had the cloud figured out the question on investors minds is where to go from here should you avoid some of the high flyers that are richly valued with eye-popping multiples or should you continue to buy the dip and if so which companies that capitalized on the trends from last year will see permanent shifts in spending patterns that make them a solid long-term play hello and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we shine the spotlight on three companies that may be candidates for a buy the dip strategy and it's our pleasure to welcome in ivana delevco who's the chief investment officer and founder of spear alpha a new research-centric etf focused on industrial technology ivana is a long-time equity analyst with a background in both long and short investing ivana welcome to the program thanks so much for coming on thanks for having me david yeah it's really our pleasure i i want to start with your etf and give the folks a bit more background about you first you know we gotta let people know i'm not an investment pro i'm not an advisor i don't make stock recommendations i don't sell investments so you got to do your own research i have a lot of data so happy to share it but you got to understand your own risks you of course yvonne on the other hand you do offer investment services and so people before investing got to carefully review all the available available investment docs understand what you're getting into before you invest now with that out of the way ivana i have some stats up here on this slide your spear you're a newly launched female lead firm that does deep research into the supply chain we're going to talk about that you try to uncover as i understand it under-appreciated industrial tech firms and some really pretty cool areas that we list here but tell us a little bit more about your background and your etf so thanks for having me david my background is in industrial research and industrial technology investments i've spent the past 15 years covering this space and what we've seen over the past five years is technology changes that are really driving fundamental shifts in industrial manufacturing processes so whether this is 5g connectivity innovation in the software stack increasing compute speeds all of these are major technological advancements that are impacting uh traditional manufacturers so what we try to do is assess speak to these firms and assess who is at the leading and who is at the lagging end of this digital transformation and we're trying to assess what vendors they're using what processes they're implementing and that is how we generate most of our investment ideas okay great and and we show on the bottom of of this sort of intro slide if you will uh so one of the processes that you use and one of the things that that is notable a lot of people compare you uh to kathy woods are investments when you came out uh i think you use a different process i mean maybe there are some similarities in terms of disruption but at the bottom of this slide it shows a mckinsey sort of graphic that that i think informs people as to how you really dig into the supply chain from a research standpoint is that right absolutely so for us it's all about understanding the supply chain going deep in the supply chain and gather data points from primary sources that we can then translate into investment opportunities so if you look at this mckinsey graph uh you will see that there is a lot of opportunity to for these companies to transform themselves both on the front end which means better revenue better products and on their operation side which means lower cost whether it's through better operations or through better processes on the the back end so what we do is we will speak to a traditional manufacturing company and ask them okay well what do you use for better product development and they will give us the name of the firms and give us an assessment of what's the differences between the competitors why they like one versus the other so then we're gonna take the data and we will put it into our financial model and we'll understand the broader market for it um the addressable market the market share that the company has and will project the growth so for these higher growth stocks that that you cover the main alpha generation uh potential here is to understand what the amount of growth these companies will generate over the next 10 to 20 years so it's really all about projecting growth in the next three years in the next five years and where will growth ultimately settle in in the next 10 to 20 years love it we're gonna have a fun conversation because today we're going to get into your thesis for cooper snowflake and z scalar we're going to bring in some of our own data some of our data from etr and and why you think these companies may be candidates for long-term growth and and be buy the dip stock so to do that i hacked up this little comparison slide we're showing here i do this for context our audience knows i'm not a cfa or a valuation expert but we like to do simple comparisons just to give people context and a sense of relative size growth and valuation and so this chart attempts to do that so what i did is i took the most recent quarterly revenue for cooper snowflake and z scalar multiplied it by four to get a run rate we included servicenow in the table just for baseline reference because bill mcdermott as we've reported aspires to make service now the next great enterprise software company alongside with salesforce and oracle and some of the others and and all these companies that we list here that through the three here they aspire to do so in their own domain so we're displaying the market cap from friday morning september 10th we calculated a revenue run rate multiple and we show the quarterly revenue growth and what this data does is gives you a sense of the three companies they're well on their way to a billion dollars in revenue it underscores the relationship between revenue growth and valuation snowflake being the poster child for that dynamic savannah i know you do much more detailed financial analysis but let's talk about these companies in order maybe start with koopa they just crushed their quarter i mean they blew away consensus on the top line what else about the company do you like and why is it on your by the dip list so just to back up david on valuation these companies investors either directly or indirectly value on a dcf basis and what happened at the beginning of the year as interest rates started increasing people started freaking out and once you plug in 100 basis points higher interest rate in your dcf model you get significant price downside so that really drove a lot of the pullback at the beginning of the year right now where we stand today interest rates haven't really moved all that significantly off the bot of the bottom they're still around the same levels maybe a little bit higher but those are not the types of moves that are going to drive significant downside in this stock so as things have stabilized here a lot of these opportunities look pretty attractive on that basis so koopa specifically came out of our um if you go back to that uh the chart of like where the opportunities lie in um in across the manufacturing uh um enterprise koopa is really focused on business pen management so they're really trying to help companies reduce their cost uh and they're a leader in the space uh they're unique uh unique in that they're cloud-based so the feedback we've been hearing from from our companies that use it jetblue uses it train technologies uses it the feedback we've been hearing is that they love the ease of implementation so it's very easy to implement and it drives real savings um savings for these companies so we see in our dcf model we see multiple years of this 30 40 percent growth and that's really driving our price target yeah and we can i can confirm that i mean i mean just anecdotally you know you know we serve a lot of the technology community and many of our clients are saying hey okay you know when you go to do invoicing or whatever you work with procurement it's koopa you know this is some ariba that's kind of the legacy which is sap we'll talk about that a little later but let's talk about snowflake um you know snowflake we've been tracking them very closely we know the management there we've watched them through their last two companies now here and have been following that company early on since since really 2015. tell us why you like snowflake um and and maybe why you think it can continue its rapid growth thanks david so first of all i need to compliment you on your research on the company on the technology side so where we come in is more from understanding where our companies can use soft snowflake and where snowflake can add value so what we've been hearing from our companies is the challenge that they're facing is that everybody's moving to the cloud but it's not as simple as just send your data to the cloud and call aws and they're gonna generate more revenue for your solve your cost problem so what we've been hearing is that companies need to find tools that are easy to use where they can use their own domain expertise and just plug and play so um ansys is one of the companies we covered the dust simulation they've found snowflake to be an extremely useful tool in sales lead generation and within sales crm systems have been around for a while and they're they've really been implemented but analyzing sales numbers is something that is new to this company some some of our companies don't even know what their sales are even when they look back after the quarter is closed so tools like this help um companies do easy analytics and therefore drive revenue and cost savings growth so we see really big runway for for this company and i think the most misunderstood part about it is that people view it as a warehousing data warehousing play while this is all about compute and the company does a good job separating the two and what our their customers like or like the companies that we cover like about it is that it can lower their compute costs um and make it much easier much more easily manageable for them great and we're going to talk about more about each of these companies but let's talk about z-scaler a bit i mean z-scaler is a company we've been very excited about and identified them kind of early on they've definitely benefited from the move to cloud generally and specifically the remote work uh situation with the cyber threats etc but tell us why you like z-scaler so interestingly z-scaler um we like the broader security space um the broader cyber security space and interestingly our companies are not yet spending to the level that is commensurate with the increase in attack rate so we think this is a trend that is really going to accelerate as we go forward um my own board 20 of the time on the last board meeting was spent on cyber security what we're doing and this is a pretty simple operation that that we're running here so you can imagine for a large enterprise with thousands of people all around the world um needing to be on a single simple system z-scaler really fits well here very easy to implement several of our industrial companies use it siemens uses it ge uses it and they've had great great experience with it excellent i just want to take a quick look at how some of these names have performed over the last year and and what if anything this data tells us this is a chart comparing the past 12 months performance of of those four companies uh that we just talked about and we added in you know servicenow z scalar as you can see has outperformed the other despite your commentary on discounted cash flow snowflake is underperformed really precisely for the reasons that you mentioned not to mention the fact that it was pretty highly valued and you can see relative to the nas but it's creeping back lately after very strong earnings even though the stock dropped after it beat earnings because the street wants the cfo to say to guide even higher than maybe as mike scarpelli feels is prudent and you can see cooper has also underperformed relatively speaking i mean it absolutely destroyed consensus this week the stock went up but it's been off with the the weaker market this week i know you like to take a longer term view but but anything you would add here yeah so interestingly both z-scaler and koopa were in the camp of as we went into earnings expectations were already pretty high because few of their competitors reported very strong results so this scalar yesterday their revenue growth was was pretty strong the stock is down today uh and the reason is because people were kind of caught up a little bit in the noise of this quarter growth is 57 last quarter it was 60 like is this a deceleration we don't see it as that at all and the company brought up one point that i thought was extremely interesting which is as their deal sizes are getting larger it takes a little longer time for them to see the revenue come through so it takes a little bit of time to for you to see it into from billings into into revenue same thing with cooper very strong earnings report but i think expectations were already pretty high going into it uh given the service now and um and anna plan as well reported strong results so i think it's all about positioning so we love these setups where you can buy the deep in on this opportunity where like people get caught up in um short-term noise and and it creates good entry points excellent i i want to bring in some data from our partner etr and see if you have any comments ivana so what we're showing here is a two-dimensional chart we like to show this uh very frequently it's based on a survey of between a thousand and fifteen hundred chief information officers and technology buyers every quarter this is from their most recent july survey the vertical axis shows net score which is a measure of spending momentum i mean this it measures the net percentage of customers in the survey that are spending more on a particular product or platform in other words it essentially subtracts the percentage of customers spending less from those spending more which yields a net score it's more granular than that but basically that's what it does the horizontal axis is market share or pervasiveness in the data set it's not revenue market share like you get from idc it's it's a mention market share and now that red dotted line at the 40 percent mark on the vertical represents an elevated level in other words anything above 40 percent we consider notable and we've plotted our three by the dip companies and included some of their competitors for context and you can see we added salesforce servicenow and oracle and that orange ellipse because they're some of the bigger names in the software business so let's take these in alphabetical order ivana starting with koopa in the blue you can see we plotted them next to sap's ariba and you can see cooper has stronger spending momentum but not as much presence in the market so to me my influence is oh that's an opportunity for them to steal share more modern technology you know more facile and of course oracle has products in this space but the oracle dot includes all oracle products not just the procurement stuff but uh maybe your thoughts on this absolutely i love this chart i think that's your spot on this would be the same way i would interpret the chart where um increased spending momentum is is a sign of the company providing products that people like and we we expect to see cooper's share grow market share grow over time as well so let's come back to the chart and i want to i want to really point out the green ellipse this is the data zone if you will uh and we're like a broken record on this program with snowflake has performed unbelievably well in net score and spending momentum every quarter the dtr has captured enough end sample in its survey holding near or above 80 percent its net score consistently is has been up there and we've plotted data bricks in that zone it's been expected right that data bricks is going to do an ipo this year late last month company raised 1.6 billion in a private round so i guess that was either a strategy to delay the ipo or raise a bunch more cash and give late investors a low risk bite at the apple you know pre-ipo as we saw with snowflake last year what we didn't plot here are some of snowflake's biggest competitors ivana who also happen to be their partners most notably the big cloud players all who have their own database offerings aws microsoft and google now you've said snowflake is much more than a database company i wonder if you could add some color here yeah that's a very good point david uh basically the the driver of the thesis in snowflake is all about acceleration and spending and what we are seeing is the customers that are signed up on their platform today they're not even spending they're probably spending less than five percent of what they can ultimately spend on this product and the reason is because they don't yet know what the ultimate applications are for this right so you're gonna start with putting the data in a format you can use and you need to come up with use cases or how are you actually going to use this data so back to the example that i gave with answers the first use case that they found was trying to optimize leads there could be like 100 other use cases and they're coming up with with those on a daily basis so i would expect um this score to keep keep uh keep up pretty high or or go even higher as we as people figure out how they can use this product you know the buy-the-dip thesis on snowflake was great last quarter because the stock pulled back after they announced earnings and when we reported we said you know mike the the company see well cleveland research came out remember they got the dip on that and we looked at the data and we said mike scarpelli said that you know we're going to probably as a percentage of overall customers decelerate the net net new logos but we're going deeper into the customer base and that's exactly what's happening with with snowflake but okay let's bring up the slide again last but not least the z scaler we love z scalar we named z scaler in 2019 as an emerging four-star security company along with crowdstrike and octa and we said these three should be on your radar and as you see we've plotted z scalar with octa who with its it's its recent move into to converging identity and governance uh it gets kind of interesting uh we plotted them with palo alto as well another cyber security player that we've covered extensively we love octa in addition to z-scaler we great respect for palo alto and you'll note all of them are over that 40 percent line these are disruptors they're benefiting well not so much palo alto they're more legacy but the the other two are benefiting from that shift to work from home cloud security modern tech stack uh the acquisition that octa-made of of of auth0 and again z scalar cloud security getting rid of a lot of hardware uh really has a huge tailwind at its back if on a zscaler you know they've benefited from the huge my cloud migration trend what are your thoughts on the company so i actually love all three companies that are there right and the point is people are just going to spend more money whether you are on the cloud of the cloud the data centers need more security as well so i think there is a strong case to be made for all three with this scaler the upside is that it's just very easy to use very easy to implement and if you're somebody that is just setting up infrastructure on the cloud there is no reason for you to call any other competitor right with palo alto the case there is that if you have an established um security platfor if you're on their security platform the databa on the data center side uh they they did introduce through several acquisitions a pretty attractive cloud offering as well so they've been gaining share as well in the space and and the company does look pretty attractive on valiation basis so for us cyber security is really all about rising tide lifts all boats here right so you can have a pure play like this scaler uh that benefits from the cloud but even somebody like palo alto is pretty well positioned um to benefit yeah we think so too over a year ago we reported on the valuation divergence between palo alto and fortinet fortinet was doing a better job moving to the cloud and obviously serves more of a mid-market space palo alto had some go-to-market execution challenges we said at the time they're going to get through those and when we talk to chief information security officers palo alto is like the gold standard they're the thought leader they want to work with them but at the same time they also want to participate in some of these you know modern cloud stacks so i we agree there's plenty of room for all three um just to add a bit more color and drill into the spending data a little bit more this slide here takes that net score and shows the progression since january 2019 and you can see a snowflake just incredible in terms of its ability to maintain that elevated net score as we talked about and the table on the insert it shows you the number of responses and all three of these companies have been getting more mentions over time but snowflake and z scale are now both well over 100 n in the survey each quarter and the other notable piece here and this is really important you can see all three are coming out of the isolation economy with the spending uptick nice upticks shown in the most recent survey so that's again another positive but i want to close ivana with kind of making the bull and bear case and have you address really the risks to the buy the dip scenario so look there are a lot of reasons to like these companies we talked about them cooper they've got earnings momentum you know management on the call side had very strong end market demand this the stock you know has underperformed the nasdaq you know this year snowflake and zscaler they also have momentum snowflake get this enormous tam uh although they were punished for not putting a hard number on it which is ridiculous in my opinion i mean the thing is it's huge um the investors were just kind of you know wanting a little binky baby blanket but they all have modern tech in the cloud and really importantly this shows in the etr surveys you know the momentum that they have so very high retention is the other point i wanted to make the very very low churn of these companies however cooper's management despite the blowout quarter they gave kind of underwhelming guidance they've cited headwinds uh they've with the the the lamisoft uh migration to their cloud platform snowflake is kind of like price to perfection so maybe that's an advantage because every every little negative news is going to going to cause the company to dip but it's you know it's pretty high value because salutman and scarpelli everybody expects them to surpass what happened at servicenow which was a rocket ship and it could be all argued that all three are richly priced and overvalued so but ivana you're looking out as you said a couple of years three years maybe even five years how do you think about the potential downside risks in in your by the dip scenario you buy every dip you looking for bigger dips or what's your framework there so what we try to do is really look every quarter the company reports is there something that's driving fundamental change to the story or is it a one-off situation where people are just misunderstanding what the company is reporting so in the case we kind of addressed some of the earnings that that were reported but with koopa we think the man that management is guiding conservatively as they should so we're not very concerned about their ability to execute on on the guidance and and to exceed the guidance with snowflake price to perfection that's never a good idea to avoid a stock uh because it just shows that there is the company is doing a great job executing right so um we are looking for reports like the cleveland report where they would be like negative on the stock and that would be an entry point uh for us so broadly we apply by the deep philosophy but not not if something fundamentally changes in the story and none of these three are showing any signs of fundamental change okay we're going to leave it right there thanks to my guest today ivana tremendous having you would love to have you back great to see you thank you david and def you definitely want to check out sprx and the spear etf now remember i publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com these episodes they're all available as podcasts all you do is search breaking analysis podcasts you can always connect with me on twitter i'm at d vallante or email me at david.vellante at siliconangle.com love the comments on linkedin don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey action this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr be well and we'll see you next time [Music] you

>> Announcer: From London, England. It's theCUBE covering Coupa Inspire '19 EMEA brought to you by Coupa. >> Hi welcome to theCUBE! Lisa Martin on the ground in London, at Coupa Inspire '19. Pleased to welcome to theCUBE for the first time, Mads Fink Jensen, partner advisory from KPMG. Mads, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you Lisa, it's a pleasure to be here. >> It's great to have you. So we have all this excitement around us, lots of folks here in London for Coupa Inspire. Talk to me about the state of procurement. Coupa talks about PIPE, procurement, invoicing, payments, expenses, but procurement has been changing a lot recently. You have a lot of experience in procurement. Talk to me about what the state of procurement is like today, and what some of those waves of disruption are. >> Yeah. So you could say traditionally, procurement has been very much about making agreements with suppliers. The business have had a need and asked or requested procurement to fulfill that need. Typically, it has taken a lot of time and a lot of effort from the procurement departments, in many cases delaying projects and things like that. Businesses are much more agile now, they expect, you from, different back office functions, including procurement, they expect a much more agile approach to delivering services. So if you are running a projects in the business, and you go to procurement asking for a specific service or product, and procurement says, "Ah this will take "four to six months", that is absolutely not acceptable. So the businesses in general are now, you could say, transforming the way that they are requesting procurement services, which means procurement are now being disrupted quite a lot. They have to think very differently. They have to be more proactive instead of being a reactive business partner, you could day. So being proactive in the sense that they embrace the business and actually deliver the needs before they are asked by the business. So that's a way where procurement organizations they need to be much more predictive, and understand what's going on, both in the business, but also in the market. And then you could say, on the other hand, procurement traditionally, they do a contract, and then they finalize the contract, and then they kind of keep their hands off. So the future is that procurement, they do a contract of course, that's a key part of being a procurement department, but they also need to operationalize the contract. So in terms of making sure that the users in the business, that they can actually use the contract and buy under that specific contract. So a lot of things are changing in procurement, which also means that you will see now` different operating models. You will see different interaction with businesses, and you will see quite a lot of different expectations coming from the business to the procurement departments. >> I can imagine that will be, those are challenges for say, an incumbent Chief Procurement Officer, or financial decision maker who's used to certain processes with certain boundaries. How, in your advisory role, do you work with clients to help them even just embrace the cultural change that's required of this function, to be much more strategic, and much more impactful to a business? >> Absolutely. I mean, you know, we use Coupa as a platform to help clients transforming the way that they are doing procurement, and actually we don't see a Coupa implementation as an IT implementation project, we see it as a business transformation project. And the thing is that, one thing is that you start changing the way that you are doing things, but it's also a mindset change. >> Lisa: Yes. >> And the challenge here for CPOs, so for procurement officers, is actually to make sure that the procurement organization have the necessary challenges to make that transformation. And you know, a lot of the stuff that we are doing when we're implementing solutions like Coupa, is of course taking away all the transactional work. That's automated, and we are also providing insights. So insight into spend, insight into transaction, to transaction processes, to turn around times, to delivery, to you know, all these kind of things. And the challenge for the CPO is to make sure that the part of the organization that are currently doing very transactional processes, how can they transform to becoming more strategic thinking and proactive people. >> And tell me how, from KPMG's perspective, how is Coupa helping to drive that transformation for its customers? >> Yeah, it's a good question actually, because I mean, Coupa is a technology, but it's also much more than a technology, because as Coupa also emphasizes, it's also about a community. >> Lisa: Yes. >> So the thing is that, with a platform like Coupa, you get technology support for your processes, but you also get a lot more insight. So you get a lot of possibilities to act in a very different way. So for instance, you can see spend patterns, so in that way you can predict how businesses actually on an annual basis what their need will be. So in that way, you can also prepare for some of the stuff that are happening in the business. And also, you could say, as a procurement person, as a sourcing manager or category innovators, as Coupa is calling it, you now have the insight to actually think more strategic on your supplier base, on the market tendencies, you can see how other companies are procuring stuff, are they going from one type of vendors to another type of vendors, and how is that going. So you could say, Coupa is a tool, not only to structure processes and do transformations, but it's also a platform and a technology that changes the way that you think and you act. >> You mentioned the word predictive a second ago, and one of the things that, well the P in Coupa stands for prescriptive. Rob talked about, I think was over 22,000 prescriptions that were delivered through the community just in the last, I think he said 12 months, very short period of time. A lot of innovation there. Helping a business in whatever industry it's in, go from being reactive to proactive to predictive, is that a game changer, or is that something that you think every business has to become predictive to be relevant? >> Yeah, so you could say, of course it differs a little bit from industry to industry, there are many different ways of looking at the procurement, but a general thing across industries that doesn't really change whether it's manufacturing or fast moving consumer goods, or pharmaceutical or whatever, is that procurement needs to understand the business that they are serving, because traditionally, procurement they are a little bit isolated, like IT was 10, 15 years ago, didn't really understand what's going on in the business in many cases, in many cases it's not like that, but in many cases it is, you know, they are very transactional, they establishing contracts and things like that, but the thing is that if you don't understand your business, and if you don't understand the way that your business operates, you know, you can have annual cycles, you can have innovation cycles, you can have different demands in the market depending on the time of year and things like that. So in general, procurement organizations really need to change their mindset of getting out there, speaking with the business, understanding the business, understanding the strategies, aligning the procurement strategies into the general business strategy, and then embrace innovation, because, I mean, even though Coupa as a platform is at a really, really nice place right now, with a lot of transformational possibilities, I mean who know what comes tomorrow. There will be a number of different things changing over the course of two, six months, a year, two years, things like that. So I think in general, procurement organizations need to think in a much more agile way, adapting what the company in general is adapting. >> So tell me, let's dig a little bit deeper into what KPMG and Coupa are doing together to drive the future of procurement. >> Absolutely, so KPMG have developed a framework we call Powered Procurement, which is a framework that gives, you could say, clients a very, very structured way of doing a transformation, and that framework is actually built on top of the Coupa platform. So we have developed a model, which is, you could say, technology agnostic, but we have specifically developed a model that is placed on top of the Coupa platform, where we utilizes the possibilities the platform have, and one core thing is that the mantra of Coupa is measurable as business value, and the transformation that we want to do together with our clients is exactly open their eyes in terms of how do you get measurable business value, because how do you measure it, what is it that you want to measure, is it savings only? Not necessarily. It can be a lot of different things. And the Coupa platform you could say enable that transformation process in a really, really good way, because you actually don't really think about technology, you think about business transformation, and that's why I think the way that we utilize Coupa as a platform is quite unique. >> So thinking back to your long history in procurement advisory, your background as a supplier on the industry side, when you look at that compared to your day to day life where you're a consumer and you're buying things very easily through Amazon and different marketplaces, how is Coupa helping to bring in some of that consumerization and help meet the demands of people that want things to be, to your point, I don't want to be looking at a UI, or a technology, I want this to simpler like it is when I'm going to buy groceries online. >> Mads: Absolutely. >> Are they helping to really bridge that gap? >> So it's a really good question, actually, because you could say, in reality, the value comes from a meaningful experience, and you could say traditionally, when you have, you know, I was part of the Maersk organization, the Danish shipping company, and we did a lot of stuff on behalf of the business to make sure that they could execute their role and get the products and services they needed. It was typically a very cumbersome process, where people had to think in very complex processes and you know, how do I actually get this thing I need now? And what's happening now with a platform like Coupa is that you actually adopt the way of thinking coming from your private life as well. So it's kind of merging a little bit the way that you think when you do procurement because it's not a complex process. Of course, it takes longer in a business environment, you could say, also because you need to do different sourcing exercises, there are regulations in the public sector and so forth, but in the way that you're thinking of how you procure, and get access to the goods and services that you need for executing your role, it's a very different mindset. And that's where technologies like Coupa comes in as a, you could say, straightforward way of getting access to these things. >> So KPMG clearly has choice in who it chooses to partner with. Tell me a little bit more about what Coupa and the partnership means to KPMG, and the competitive differentiation it might deliver. >> Yeah absolutely, I mean there are a number of different platforms in the market, of course, and it's actually quite interesting this year because there's a lot of development. I actually started out a new company in 2001 where we developed an e-procurement platform, and I can tell that both the suppliers, and the market and the suppliers in general, have changed quite a lot since then. (laughs) >> Lisa: I can imagine. >> And a lot of more actors are coming into the market. And the interesting thing is that, you know, the traditional actors, they have quite some difficulties in following up with a company like Coupa. And you could say Coupa as a platform is really interesting because it, first of all it adopts the cloud technology, which means that companies doesn't have to think about you know, maintenance, operations, all these things that typically come with on premise solutions, and it has this ability to create this community, because the technology platform is developed and designed and architected in the way it is, which means you have a suite of components that all feeds into a common community, which create, you could say, a much, much better platform to innovate than what we see in the competing landscape. So in essence, when Rob today talked about the community, that's where we see a huge differentiator, the way that Coupa works with the community, and takes intelligence from the community, and based on that can actually come up with really, really impressive, innovative ideas. >> Last question for you, Mads. The category of business spend management that Coupa is working hard to define, what does that from KPMG's perspective? >> Yeah, so you could say, for me it's actually quite relieving that there is an actor in the market that starts to talk about business spend management. It's a new term that Coupa have introduced. I mean there have been variations on that subject, but it's the first time that you have a very clear pronunciation of what this is all about, because business spend management is much more than just than the, you could say, the narrow procurement bit. Procurement is of course a huge part of it, but I mean, there are expense management, as an example, you have all the procurement stuff, you have spend in a lot of different areas like salary, that's not kind of part of the platform yet, but which would make a lot of sense, you could say. So this is the first time where you actually have a suite that in all the different components and areas, embrace business spend management. And in essence, you could say, I think, Rob also mentioned it in a very good way, this is actually, it's the procurement department that manages a huge part of the value of the company, in terms of managing the spend. So it's an extremely important task that organizations have, and the good thing is that we see, increasingly see that procurement gets closer and closer to the strategic area of businesses. >> Well Mads, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE, and describing the procurement history that you have, what KPMG and Coupa are doing together. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you Lisa, it was a pleasure to be here. >> Likewise. For Mads, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Coupa Inspire London '19. Thanks for watching.

from London England it's the cube covering Koopa inspire 19 Mei brought to you by Koopa hey welcome to the cube Lisa Martin on the ground in London at Koopa inspire 19 very pleased to welcome to the cube for the first time we have Dean Henry the EVP of business financing and supplier management from American Express Dean welcome to the cube thank you happy to be here so let's talk about payments we those of us in our date lives as consumers the b2c transactions are so easy these days right you can transact from your phone from your watch it's we're doing everything we're paying bills we're buying things yet in the b2b space business payments haven't had as rapid as innovation as we seen on the on the consumer side talk to me a little bit about the business-to-business payments industry from MX's perspective before we get in to what you guys are doing with Cooper yeah well first comment on on the innovation you're absolutely right the innovation that's happening and retail payments hasn't made its way to b2b payments I think that's mostly a function of you know a consumer having the ease to try something new download an app and and change the way that they transact a bit at a store but with with whomever they're paying whereas a big business has a lot of processes that drive their their business spend and the way that they manage it and systems and you know as we're here talking with Koopa today you know the the processes that they automate and that they bring are critical to you know making payments happen and because because of that there's just barriers to entry that make make b2b payments harder to mirror the speed that you see in the retail side that said there's a lot of exciting things happening you know b2b payments is a hundred and twenty seven trillion dollar market globally it's a big profit pool that a lot of players are innovating in and when you look into the landscape and you consider who's playing out there you know there's traditional big banks that have been sort of the stalwarts of Global Payments there's obviously a large and grow and growing FinTech community with new companies every day that are in the media offering new capabilities to to clients and then there's players like American Express and I think we're actually uniquely positioned in that landscape with not too many exactly like us and when you look at you know the big banks and some of the challenges that they have when I talk to our customers about fees and and you know processes that take a while or money that moves with with relative uncertainty in terms of how much is actually going to show up and the beneficiaries account based on lifting fees as money moves between banks and then you look at the FinTech community that's new innovative solutions but you're not sure that they're always going to be around you know after the next funding cycle I think we're we're trying to play an in the middle where were a great alternative to the FinTech community we're a global platform for payments we're a global platform for lending so we can really do all the things that a FinTech can do all the things that a bank can do in many instances and and do that with the brand and the certainty that is a max and so we're excited about the space and we're investing a lot of time and energy and and partnering where we need to in order to make sure our customers can transact where they want us to to help them facilitate commerce right that point of enabling a customer to transact where they want what influences are you is the American Express seeing and being able to infuse into your partnerships from the consumer side from that consumer who buy something with a click or a swipe on Amazon and wants to be able to do something similar in their business day job tell me about the influence that American Express is seeing and what that position that you just subscribe is allowing you guys to say all right this is a direction that we're gonna go and because we know yeah I need to meet you mr. customer where you are right what look I think part of it is is demographics to be perfectly honest if you look at Gen Y and Gen Z they're they're more of the decision makers in today's management they will be even more tomorrow's management and so they to your point have that expectation that their business life shouldn't be that much more complex in their personal life so so what we're trying to do is find the partners that have the best user experience and make sure our solutions work seamlessly there that's step one that's that's what we're doing here with Koopa step two is we're also trying to make sure that our capabilities on on Amex a digital real-estate works just it just as easily as our retail side of our business and we're we're doing that you know with a with the unifying principles and American Express which is you know the trust and the service and the brand that that we offer to our clients but then also the the merchant rewards so there's a rich history of of American Express providing a differentiated value proposition with the credit card rewards that that exists and we take take that capability into our our business relationships and make sure that it's a value add to those customers that want it so let's talk about what American Express is doing with Kupa what was it just announced with Koopa pay so yeah Koopa pay you know I was impressed by the stats that Rob put up there they're they're growing quickly and we want to be part of it we're a candidly following the requests of our clients who want American Express as a payment option inside the Koopa pay we offer a tremendous value prop inside of Koopa pay the data that flows with a payment the data that we're able to collect that differentiates us from our competition helps our our clients reconcile their payments eliminate the paper realize the efficiencies that that Koopas clients are excited about and so we're they're simply enabling American Express to be a payment option and my hope and I think Koopas hope is that that's step one of a partnership and and will be able to do more together to serve our collective clients so this is enabling American Express of virtual cards be available as a payment option within Kupa pay yes and what is a virtual card so virtual card is is a virtual credit card number it can be a one-time use or a multi-use okay and you know our our clients use it for several different reasons you know buyers of of goods use a virtual card in order to make the payment of a supplier easier to get more data along with the transaction so that they can reconcile a payment to a purchase order and to associated invoices the suppliers get benefit as well and in that they to get enhanced data to reconcile payment that they receive on their end there's also working capital benefit in that if if a buyer chooses to pay early an invoice we can extend financing and pay the the supplier earlier so that they have more working capital to operate their business and so so it's a real balanced value prop where both parties are realizing value is this going to enable a buyer to have benefits like increased security with the way the virtual card works yeah what increased security and so far as a virtual card isn't is encrypted the fact that you know American Express stands behind all of our card payments with our brand and our promise that differentiates from you know a traditional bank payment you know ACH and other other low value clearings that don't have those guarantees along with it and so so that is a big differentiator but but I think candidly the the biggest benefit our clients see is the enhanced data and the working capital I think that's where we're trying to enrich both sides of the transaction give more data to enable the automation that's happening in the industry and extend credit so that businesses can operate more efficiently and and and by the things that they need to buy and hire the people they need to hire is this also something that will give suppliers and buyers more visibility you talked about enhanced data well they now have more visibility over buyers like different supplier options or suppliers with different ways that they can get paid so certainly enhance visibility on on when a suppliers getting paid and relative to the invoice date and what we're trying to do is work with Koopa and work with our partners around well how do we enhance the data so that so that as you know Koopa talks about the community of suppliers that their buyers utilize how can we be part of that how do we support the buyers and making decisions the suppliers and utilizing American Express as a as a source to be a verified business that has gone through all the legal legal checks that are required in commerce and bringing both of those capabilities to to do a transaction on the Koopa Network one of the stats that Rob mentioned this morning and love stats I really geeked out over them I don't know why you say there's five million plus suppliers on the Koopa platform is that an advantage that American Express sees to help extend the footprint of your virtual cards absolutely I what I'm candidly more excited about is the millions and millions of suppliers that are on the American Express network and that's an asset that I see personally as something that we can work with with Koopa and other partners to bring you know the businesses that are already verified that are on our network that we personally talk to every you know every year and bring those verified profiles to the commerce networks like Koopa so that it's easier to transact on Koopa if you have an American Express card got it and then last question for you is if we look at this partnership what was announced today this is launching in the UK and Australia first and then you'll roll it up more globally can you tell me a little bit about why those two regions yeah one that's going to be available for customers to use so so the honest answer is we wanted to be fast to market and quick and quick out to our customer base the UK and Australia are two very important geographies for us so we're launching first in those places by the end of the year and then looking at rolling out in the US and early 2020 and then from their expanding alongside excellent well Dean thank you for joining me on the cube this afternoon sharing what's new with Amex and Cooper we appreciate your time thank you so much really happy to be here excellent for Dean Henry I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the cube from Cooper inspire London 19 thanks for watching [Laughter]

>>From London, England. It's the cube covering Koopa inspire 19 brought to you by Cooper. >>Hey, welcome to the cube. At least the Martin on the ground in London, a Coupa inspire 19 and I'm really excited to be joined by my last guest of the day. Save the best for last. We have Roger Hamoud, the EVP of products from Kupo Russia. Welcome back to the program. Thank you for having me. Thanks for coming here. Of course, it's been great. We've had a, we've had a great day. Lots of buzz and excitement in the expo hall. The lights are jammed. It's happy hours. Happy hour for time for the Q during happy hour. So I know your keynote is tomorrow, so we'll get to that since we won't cover that. But talk to me about some of the new product innovations that Cuba announced today. The last time we spoke at inspire Las Vegas was only a few months ago. So what's new? Wow. A lot is new. It's, it's hard to believe. >>It's only been three months since then. It's been so close. Um, we very much continue our, um, focus on our community. Powered, uh, capabilities. Uh, this has been an incredible focus for us. Uh, so most recently we've added to all of the announcements we talked about at, uh, Vegas, uh, the, um, next waves of source together the opportunity to bring our community to come and source, uh, using their collective spent power and lots of new enhancements in that area. And also we're taking our supplier insights to the next level. One of the exciting capabilities our customers loved is that being part of a community member, I can come in and I can look at insights across all of my suppliers, uh, from the entire community. What we have, we've been working with them on is constantly adding more and more information to that. So now we have diversity data. >>So you can come in and you can search for suppliers that meet your women. Exactly. Exactly. Those are increasingly becoming more and more important. And then we can help companies source with the right suppliers much more easily right off the bat. Um, other areas that we've announced today was a coupon pay for expenses in early access program. Uh, we also announced invoice thing. Um, going on GA, when we talked in Vegas, it was still in the early access program, uh, capabilities and opening up our platform, Coupa as a platform. >> Uh, tell me about that, cause I wasn't quite clear when Rob was talking about it this morning. I thought I wanna dig in that with you. Kupa as a platform. What is that? What does it look like? So what's exciting about this is, so from our inception as a company, we were always had this old in Cooper about being open as an ally for the entire ecosystem that our customers might have. >>Our vision has always been, we want to be the, ultimately the business screen for everything business spend management related for our customers. So over years we kept taking the level of openness with our partners through different, um, different levels. If you say, if you will, for example, we started with just integrations in the beginning and we certify these integrations with coupon link. Um, we've taken it most recently where we allow partners to embed their mini apps within Cooper. So, for example, um, you can see in one of our partners EcoVadis now they have the capability to embed their supplier diversity data sustainability data right on the supplier record. Okay. And what's beautiful about this is that our customers, when they look at it, it looks a one beautiful unified experience and bringing all the data in context for what they want. Um, today, this morning, uh, Rob shared one example from Amadeus for, uh, trip integrations. >>So right on the homepage, I can see right within Cooper, I can see all their bookings that I've done with the travel provider, Mike pre-approvals, expense reports, all within one unified experience. But ultimately where we want to take coop as a platform is to become this app directory that, uh, third party partners and platform developers start building applications to extend Copa to bring more choice and value to our customers. Okay. Wow. Is that one of the things I saw Rob shared this morning was integration with Slack. Yes. So business folks can review, approve, or reject, like expenses for example, right from within Slack without even having to go into the platform. Yes, yes. That you hit on a very important concept, which we call the best UI is no UI in many ways. And the idea there is um, we always put ourselves in the user's shoes and ask ourselves how do we get them what they need with the least friction? >>In some cases that might involve a user experience because you need to ask them questions and make cases. We can automate the whole thing. So we just do it. And in many cases it means we go to them to where they are such as in Slack, I'm going to ask you to leave Slack, go somewhere else right then and there you should be able to approve or reject why you have to go anywhere else. Is that what, what Cuba means by no UI is the best UI, correct. Best UI is no UI. So ultimately wherever there is effort, we, we want to involve people only when they need to add value. That's it. And as much as we're able to automate, that's great. So we take that off of their table and we also adjust to the type of experience they need. Sometimes just a text message is enough sometimes to bring the data to me into a collaboration applications that I want. >>Um, sometimes we, we help them approve right from, um, a button. You don't even go into Kupa in order to do that. So always thinking of how we drive adoption, drive adoption. And it's an important concept, not just on the employee side of companies, it's even more so on the supplier side as well. Now when you think of any or like large organizations, they have tens of thousands of thousands of suppliers, many have hundreds of thousand suppliers. And the supplier ecosystem is everything from very small contractor, mom and pop shop, maybe two people or even one person all the way to very, very large companies. Okay. So as you look at that whole spectrum, you have to really think what does every audience need? And so in many cases, these people, um, they may need to do everything very quickly straight from an email without having to remember a user ID and a password to log into something. >>So eliminates friction at every step of the process for them. Wow. So let's talk about that Vic community insights. As we look at some of the, uh, the data that KUKA has gotten from finance leaders of the UK, that was like a survey that you guys, yes, I did recently have 253 decision makers and finance and some of the numbers were glaring. Like, wow, 96% of these decision makers said we don't have complete visibility correct. Of all of our spent. And then I was talking to a customer today who said, we've got now gotten 95% of all of our business men going through Coupa and that was within less than a year. Yes. So the opportunity there to deliver that visibility and those insights back to the community is, is pumped, is incredibly exciting. It's incredibly exciting. We're starting to see more and more the sentiment that's in key, loud and clear and um, by working constantly on the AE, the accelerated and coupon, we work on getting more and more of the spend for each and every customer under management. >>Um, we, when we start to projects for customers right off the bat, uh, we use our AI classification tools before they even start with Copa, where we start helping them get visibility onto all of their existing spent so that as they start into their Coupa journey, they are always looking at it holistically. Okay. So we know them, realize all of that data and provide them insights and reports right off the bat as well. Tell me about the customer interactions that you have as the EVP of product, lot of customers on the platform, a lot of data there. How are customers influential? Yes, yes. The direction. Like for example, you know, obviously I won't give a secret sauce, but for Cooper inspire 20, 20, what are some of the things that we might see customers influencing in terms of your roadmap that direction? Partnerships? Yes. Yes. >>Um, in general, the way, um, we've always worked, uh, at Coupa with our customers and we call them like our community members really is an inc very incredibly tight partnership. Um, we have three releases a year, January, may and September. Each of them packed with roughly about anywhere 72, 19 new features and capabilities. And all of these capabilities are touched either conceived by customers, with customers or touched by customers in the form of working with them on early access validation and all of that. And for me, one of my most favorite things I get to enjoy about working in SAS and, and uh, being at Cooper is that as soon as you are rolling out these capabilities and turning them on in the cloud, customers are using them. So even though like for example right now my entire team has just finished the walkthroughs of all our may release for inspire. >>And when we come back from this trip, uh, we will start the, you know, the, these, the design and, and um, definition. Um, often we might hear of new requirements that might come up and because we are InsightSquared able to, um, here at just what it makes sense and actually be incredibly responsive to what we see. >> How do you do that? How do you look through all the different responses and correlate that data and determine what makes sense to stack? Rank in terms of priorities for new features and new capabilities. So it's definitely an art and a science for sure. Um, but there's a framework that, uh, we follow, uh, since the beginning and we continue to follow and continues to serve us really well. Uh, which is always balancing between three drivers of customers, market and innovation. So the customer one is the obvious one of course, where and many events like this and one on ones and online community. >>We're talking to customers and they're specifically coming and asking for help in areas. Now, we may not build the feature exactly as they asked, but we listened to the pain beneath it and late using the latest technologies, we think of what is the best approach to solve the real pain that they have. So that's one part of the planning for every release cycle. The other is overall market. So for example, as we grow into more regions, uh, newer areas, new spend categories, um, new adjacent powered applications that our customers are needing, um, we started expanding in that area as well. Um, for example, we, right now in London, um, a lot of, uh, when I joined Cooper back in 2012, uh, we were just starting the, uh, entry into the, uh, Mel market and a lot of the product capabilities were market driven in the sense that we were spending a lot of time on compliance and different regulations and all of that. >>And the third is innovation. And what is always one of the things as we bring people on board at Cooper and talk about the framework, um, innovation for us is what we call pragmatic innovation. And it's comes from deep understanding what are the customer problems, what are the market problems? And then we ask ourselves using everything, the latest technologies, what is the best way? So you'll never hear us talk about AI for AI sake and blockchain and all of that would always talking about do we deeply understand the problem and what is the most appropriate? Um, so we call them CMI customer innovation. Uh, within my products organization, every product managers usually has a vision for their product and they have a full release roadmap. And in each full release roadmap, they are listing things as C M I in many cases the same capability is C and M and I, so it becomes an art and a science of balancing those types of things. >>But ultimately when we look at our collective release of CMI, we're asking ourselves, how much does this release accelerate the success goals of our customers? Right. And generally that's the framework that we use. Yeah, that's fantastic. Thank you for explaining that. In terms of acceleration, some of the numbers that Rob shared this morning, we're, I think your customers are collectively approving invoices 30% faster than last year. I said medium, mid size market, customers are getting lot going live on Kupa in about four months. Correct. And mid large enterprises and about eight months. So. Right. And I've talked to a number of customers today about the speed of which they're able to get onto the platform and actually start seeing business value. So that's a free coupon for acceleration was well dissected today. Yes. Yes. It's definitely, yeah. Um, these are the vision areas that Rob talked about today. >>And in each of these vision areas, we're always asking ourselves, how do we continue to accelerate? So that's actually how one of the ideas was born around the turtle is I'm the hair, which is we want to accelerate cycle times, cycle times, and what are the different ways we can do this? What can we borrow from um, the, uh, our consumer lives to do this? And that's where the game unification came. Yes. And sure enough, it was one of those things that got people super excited and, and they're putting more attention into it. Well, the consumer side of our lives is we're so demanding because we can get anything that we want. We can buy products and services, we can pay bills with a clicker swipe. And so the B to C side from a payments perspective has innovated far more rapidly than the B2B side has. >>Correct. A lot more challenged there on the B2B side. But as consumers, we want a simple experience. One of the customers I spoke to who said when he was looking for technology, he's on what something that looks like Amazon marketplace. Yeah. Because from an adoption perspective, my teams will understand it. You so that the consumerization always interests me because we are those pretty much, you know, 12 plus hours a day and to see how software companies like KUKA are taking and meeting the needs of those customers, obviously it's not an overnight process. It gets people excited. It gets its absolutely is you right. That always fascinated me also how I've seen so many companies, um, like people almost have two personalities. Like they go into their personal life, they have a personality, they go into their professional lives and like, Oh, it's okay. It's like a backend system. >>This and this and this. Um, but increasingly the new generation is no longer tolerating and the drive is starting to just go find those shifts that happen changing, right? Yes, yes. But I can't, if I can have this in my personal life, then I need to be able to transact. Exactly. Exactly. Why does it take 45 days? Exactly. Exactly. Five days. Um, so last question for you. Since your keynote is tomorrow. Yes. What are some of the strategic visionary elements that you're going to leave the audience with? So I'm going to leave the audience with the key pillars of our strategy. Um, latest innovations we've done towards them and where we are taking them in the years ahead. One of the things I've always done over the years at inspire is we always share at preview of what, um, the community has been talking to us about and we're working with. >>And usually at the end of it, a lot of new community members might come in and ask to participate in some of the development because it means a lot to them for their own business. And then usually by the following inspire, we start showing these things actually live and, and, um, executed on. So the, um, the three strategic pillars I'll be sharing and talking about are all around the pipe that Trump talked about. Yep. How do I capture more and more spend under management? So we'll be talking about the consumerizing experiences voice using voice use Copa using facial recognition in Cooper. Uh, we'll be talking about new concepts around travel, around the group card school, applying all of it around the theme, focused on the um, end users and delight them, blow them away with consumer experiences. And then now that we do all of that, we can jump into the power users because we are increasing that spend under management. >>The theme by far is all around suite synergy suite synergy. So we seriously, this doesn't exist in the market. The market overall was all siloed applications. We're creating a new category and we've created these beautiful, elegant flows for our customers today. But there's also a wonderful long journey ahead in what we are taking up. Well maybe we'll get to talk about synergy at inspire 20 slowly. I will, we would love to have you again. Excellent. We're going to in Vegas for the afternoon. Best of luck in your keynote tomorrow and we'll see you the next inspire. Thank you. My pleasure. Thanks for Raja Hamoud. I, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube from Coupa inspire 19 from London. Bye for now.

>> 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.