(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 tech music) >> Announcer: From London, England it's theCUBE, covering Coupa Insp!re 19 Emea. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin on the ground in London at Coupa Insp!re 19. Very pleased to welcome back to theCUBE the CEO and Chairman of Coupa, Rob Bernshteyn. Rob, welcome back. >> Thank you so much, thank you for being with me. >> It's great to be here, so we are in with all of these customers and partners, this has been busy all day. You started things off today with a great keynote. I was telling you before we went live, I lost count of how many big customer examples were sprinkled, and I think infused throughout your keynote. I was looking at some numbers, Coupa just keeps doing this. 5x increase in spend under management since 2016, that's only three years. You guys have thousands of customers, five million suppliers on the platform, lot of growth. What are some of the key drivers to this great growth that you're seeing? Well a couple of things, I mean first of all, this is a huge total addressable market. Every company in the world could do a better job of the way they manage their business spending, and they could use information technology, hopefully from Coupa to help make that happen, and we are so proud to cultivate this community of like minded, thoughtful professionals that want to apply best practices, best in-class modern technology solutions like the ones we offer obviously, to drive quantifiable, measurable, outcomes for the companies that they work for. So in many ways, this is a celebration of our customer community and it's a wonderful opportunity to be with our customers here like this every year in Europe and every year in the United States, and now frankly in lots of other places around the world. >> So one of the themes that was also expressed during the keynote was Rachel Botsman's theme of trust and I think about the open community, the open platform and the community that Coupa is building, there's a lot of earned trust there that Coupa has earned from this growing community. Talk to me about what that means to you and the whole team and how it's influencing the direction that Coupa is going in. >> It means a lot to me personally frankly. The O in Coupa stands for Open, and that means not only technically open in terms of APIs and integrations, but it means open in spirit, open in dialogue, honest, transparent communications. I feel that our industry in enterprise software has a legacy or a history of a lot of PowerPoints, and a lot of demos, but frankly, quite a few failures of large scale deployments and a whole host of sectors. And we want to be part of the solution, we want to have an open, authentic, honest communication with our customers, with our prospective customers in the sales process, with our partners, with all of my Coupa colleagues, so we can avoid the friction and nonsense of politics that often gets in the way of driving measurable, meaningful value for every constituent. It's a very, very important thing to me, it's important to my team, and that's something we're doing our very best to cultivate in this Coupa community that we're creating. >> Speaking of cultivation, Coupa is cultivating this category of Business Spend Management. Tell us a little bit more about that and where you are with that. >> Sure, Business Spend Management is a pretty straightforward three words to describe the fact that our buyers and our customers are responsible for literally trillions of dollars and pounds and dollars and euros of spend all over the world. And as information becomes more and more transparent, the buyer, the one who's repsonsible for that spend becomes more and more powerful. So we sit on the side of that buyer, we give them information technology solutions from sourcing, to inventory management, to spend analytics, to procurement, to expensing, to invoicing, to payments, to supplier performance. All the capabilities needed to help them make the best purchasing decisions for their organizations, and help their companies become more profitable so that every one of these Coupa community customers we have here could get more bang for their buck and be that much more operationally efficient frankly in driving their own company's visions and missions and whatever it is that they bring to the world. And that's very aspirational for us and we're excited that so many have come on board with this establishment of the Business Spend Management category with us. >> So if we look at the PIPE, as you were calling it this morning, P-I-P-E, procure, invoice, pay, expense, I memorized that, you've got this one platform that can deliver all of that to this growing community of users who have the ability to get that visibility. That is one of the biggest challenges, I was reading some stats recently about the number of businesses, they were the percentages of businesses that don't have complete visibility over their spend, it's high. >> It's very high, we just did a study of 250 or so CFOs in the UK, and they're doing a great job at budgeting and reporting, but they have minimal visibility into their supply relationships, especially with what's happening here with Brexit. They have minimal visibility in supply risks, supply chain risks, and one of the ingredients that I think we're very special at and I'm proud of is the U in Coupa, the user centricity. In order to have visibility into your spend, you have to have adoption, you have to have people purchasing, spending, expensing, paying, processing invoices, everything that you just mentioned through this pipe on one centralized platform with a common UI layer, User Experience layer or User Interface, common business logic layer, common data model, use of community intelligence to help you make the best purchasing decisions, spend decisions. So we're really on the forefront of something very, very exciting because this adoption level is happening through this user centricity, and it's given these companies control and visibility of spend, and what could be more important to driving profitability, sustained business development? I think we're in a very unique position to help these customers. >> So is one of the biggest challenges for those, think it was 96% of those UK financial decision makers that you guys surveyed said, "We don't have complete visibility." Is it because they have legacy siloed solutions that don't give them that common layer? Or is it because maybe that and a mixture of users just not adopting it because it's not as intuitive to use? >> It's a number of things. First of all, for every process, whether it's procurement, expenses, invoicing, or payments, they have seperate systems to your point. Some cases, they don't even have systems. They're calling in orders, they're handling paper invoices, so there are different levels of maturity in each of those four areas. So one is getting them on to a common platform where all of those are orchestrating together. Secondarily, there's an opportunity to create synergy between those areas, so a lot of things that are getting expensed really should be preapproved and should be routed toward preferential pricing that procurement can negotiate on behalf of the user. Many times invoices are duplicate coming in from suppliers and AP departments are so excited that they pay quickly, but they're not necessarily sure whether they received the goods and services that the invoice is for. So having one common platform, that's the C in Coupa, Comprehensive. One common comprehensive platform for all these business processes is critical, leveraging the synergy of all them working together is critical, and getting that widespread user adoption is part of the secret formula here. >> Let's talk about the community. It's big, it's growing, 1.3 trillion in spend managed, and I watched our video back that you and I did a few months ago, it was 1.2. So that was four months ago, and you showed a bar chart today of just the last 12 months, had to look up this way to see that, so this community that has the ability to help derive and leverage the insights, talk to me about the insights and being able to help businesses go from reactive to predictive as a game changer for Coupa. >> Sure, it's a huge game changer and we really aspire to be, if you will, the tail that wags the dog in the enterprise software industry overall because the enterprise software industry, in effect, every customer is on their own island using information technology for a certain business process. What we've done with community intelligence is we've aggregated, anonymized, and sanitized data from the customer base and then are distilling insights that we could be prescriptive about. So we could tell our customers and we're telling them, "Hey, our community is having challenges with such "and such supplier based on literally perhaps millions "of dollars and millions of pounds in transactional spend. "We recommend you consider this supplier in "that same category because our community is having "great success with them. "The products are being shipped on time, "there's no war over invoicing, there's no breakage in "what's delivered." Those are just some examples, we're helping them think through commodities. A lot of our customers forgiven commodity, they have 20, 30 different suppliers. We're helping them think through in their industry. How can they do supply consolidation that makes sense based on benchmarking across the entire industry? We're helping them avoid supplier risk, we're helping them avoid fraud, we're identifying employees that may be expensing things or doing things that are fraudulent based on the collective intelligence of what we're seeing around the entire world in real time and we're prescribing actions to be taken before payments go out. So these are just some examples of what we're doing, we're doing things in benchmarking based on community intelligence, we're really just at the tip of the sphere of what's possible and we've prescribed tens of thousands of prescriptions in our platform to our customers. Many of them are taking those prescriptions and are making their businesses more operationally fit, and more agile, which is something we're very, very proud of. >> Speaking of those prescriptions, I think the number you shared this morning was 22,000 prescriptions delivered in one year? >> In the last 12 months, that's right. >> So we've got to talk about acceleration 'cause we've talked about the COUP, the acceleration, that is one example of that. I also saw that you guys have gotten, customers are doing approvals 30% faster than they were a year ago. You're getting mid-market customers up and running in four months, large enterprises up in eight months, talk to me about that acceleration that you guys are achieving. >> Absolutely, the A in Coupa is about Accelerated, it's about learning from our entire customer base and taking those learnings and making them part of best practices-based appointments so we could go faster and faster and faster. We look at retail customer, we've done dozens of retail customers, large and small. We know how to set up catalogs, we know how to set up workflow, we know how to think through the analytics that they need. So when they get going with the deployment from Coupa, they can get up and running way faster than with going back to five or six years ago where you have to think about it from scratch and a blueprint. They could leverage the insight from the community with doing that in mid-market, with doing that in subverticals like credit unions, for example. Biotechs, we're doing it in insurance, we're doing it in pharma, all hosts of industries, and I think as we learn from every deployment and collect those insights, we're going to be able to drive value faster and faster to our customers. And the other element that's important here is it's not just taking the customer live, all of our customers grow with us. They get more and more value every year, this is why our renewal rate is so strong and customers add more business with us because they're getting value and that value continues to grow, and that's really what value as a service is about. We're not a software company, and we're not a software as a service company. We're truly a value as a service company, which is a very different concept and one that we're cultivating in this marketplace. >> What are some of your favorite, I know you love being in front of the customers, what are some of your favorite examples that really show the value that Coupa is delivering to the changing role of procurement, making that girl or guy much more strategic and much more of a partner to the business? >> Sure, I shared some examples this morning that I really loved and appreciated celebrating some of our trendsetters, or what we call spendsetters. You look at Zalando, our retailer where they weren't necessarily going to take them so seriously about savings, but when they went to marketing and said, "We can give you much more bang "for your marketing budget "so you could reach more potential consumers," well of course they embraced that. And we gave them a usable opportunity, a usable platform for doing that as similar Zalando, they engaged. Now they have something like 85% spender management. When we started working with them, they had zero purchase orders, everything was the wild west. You look at, I was just speaking to one of our customers at Procter & Gamble just five minutes ago here at the expo. They've run more than 50 billion pounds of spend through the Coupa platform, 50 billion. That's not easy, but they've done that in just a couple of years with us, and not only did they have visibility spent, but they're saving, they're routing purchases to preferred suppliers, so the list just goes on and on and on our website, at Coupa.com on the Customers tab, you'll see obviously dozens of customers holding up signs of the real measurable value they're getting from working with us and that's something that we really take a lot of pride in. >> That speaks for itself. Last question for you Rob, talk to me about those strategic partnerships that Coupa has. I know some news coming out today with what you guys are doing with American Express. >> Sure, we've entered the payment space and we entered it because our customer community asked us for it. They said, "Look, if we're procuring goods "and services through you, why wouldn't we all, "and we're doing invoice and we're doing all "of the components of the pipe, "why wouldn't we also go deeper into payments, help us pay." Because many now have to log in to all these different ERP systems and kick off batch process, so we went into payments. And in payments, we have a host of partnerships. Now, today we announced the relationship with American Express in the UK and Australia for virtual credit card payments. Now it's very simple in Coupa, someone needs a good or service, it gets routed through workflow for approval. Once approved, a dynamic credit card number is generated by American Express, the individual makes the purchase, and all the reconciliation, the back-end is handled by Coupa. All the reporting, the visibility, the insights to price points and category assessments are there and visible and the company's in a position to fine tune their spend profile. So that's just one example, and we're doing things in dynamic discounting and accelerating payments. We've just launched today in general availability and Robby will be discussing it tomorrow ahead of business acceleration. We launched our batch payments capability, the ability to do invoice payments in batch along any rail, whether it be banking relationships, whether it be eCheck, whether it be credit card, going into one environment and kicking off batch payments without having to wait for all these different ERP systems to take hold. So we're really at the, in my mind, at the very beginning of addressing a huge market opportunity, we're proud of what we've achieved so far. I'm particularly proud of the customer community developing around us, and we're excited about the days, weeks, months, quarters, and years to come. >> So you talked about, last question, the big TAM, in this total adjustable market. What are some of the core elements to Coupa's path to a billion in revenue? >> We're not as exciting to many investors as a hot startup that grows really quickly and maybe has some sort of viral component to it. We've been at this for over 10 years, we've grown thoughtfully, we've grown carefully. The growth is fast 30, 40 plus percent, but it's thoughtful and careful, it's one customer at a time. We're careful in how much we spend on sales and marketing, especially want customers to choose us rather than us hard-selling them on everything, we want the offering to sell itself. We have an ecosystem of systems integrators, now more than 3,000, Centric, APMG, Deloitte, and others that are certified on deploying Coupa. We're expanding our product footprint, our customers now use on average 4.7 applications from us and they're consuming those applications rather than us pushing them on them. We're expanding globally, we're expanding in terms of the enterprise business and the mid-market business. Our mid-market business is now really at scale and scaling beautifully, it's a beautiful business model. So those are just some of the vectors in which we'll continue to expand, but I think the path to $1 billion for us is very clear, and ultimately comes down to execution, delivering for every customer, making sure they're getting value from working with us year in and year out, and I think before you know it, we'll be on the doorstep of that $1 billion. >> Excellent. Rob, it's been a pleasure having you back on theCUBE. Thank you for having theCUBE out here in London, we appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> For Rob Bernshteyn, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE from Coupa Insp!re 19. Thanks for watching. (upbeat tech music)

>> from the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. It's the Cube covering Cooper inspired 2019. >> Brought to You by Cooper. >> Welcome to the Cube from Cooper inspired 99 Lisa Martin in The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. And guess who I have with me from the main stage CEO. Rob Bernstein. Welcome to the Cube. >> You so much. Thank you for having me >> exciting start today. One of Inspire really enjoyed the general session this morning. I learned three things more than three, but there's three that really stick out. One. You like pizza >> I do >> to you like kittens and kittens. And three, since 2016 there has been a five X increase and the spend going through the coop a platform with rocket ship. >> That's right. Huge momentum were well over 1.2 trillion dollars and spend that's gone through the platform. It's accelerating, and our customers are getting a lot of value and visualizing that spending, routing it to prefer contract saving money doing in smart, compliant ways. It's a really exciting time for us. >> It is, and this is across every industry manufacturing, healthcare, retail, et cetera. Every industry has the opportunity to leverage this wealth of data absolute. Cooper has to be able to get that visibility and control of all their spent. That's really revolutionary for any business. >> Well, we're really excited about it. Our community of customers is very excited about it, where building something very special here. I'll tell you one of the most exciting things. When you see that data being used in a way that drives intelligence for each individual customers, you know, we're helping them understand Where is their potential fraud with their expenses, where their suppliers maybe sending them duplicate invoices by accident? But Ari, I picks that up. So we are taking the space to a completely new level, and it's it could be more exciting. Honestly, >> well, the amount. You know, we go 1,000,000 shows a year, maybe a little bit less, But we always hear data is oil data is gold. It is. If you have access to it, you can extract insights from it really quickly and be able to act on it faster than your competition. >> Absolutely. You have to be able to normalize the data first informal, so you need a I capabilities. To do that, you have to access a massive data store you have to anonymous. The data obviously needs to be very, very secure, and then you have to draw insights out of that data. And one of things I share this morning is that we've given our customers just in 2019 more than 18,000 prescriptions of things they should consider, for example, putting some suppliers on hold if we think there's some risk with those suppliers. So absolutely, it's a I, but it's a I as the underlying element that brings out what we call community intelligence. And that's what's what's so powerful >> and the community as well, another really kind of under town that I felt and heard this morning from us. It's a community of collaboration, thes air, other businesses benefiting from what others have learned suppliers as well. So the customer centric city, the supplier central city, is there. >> Absolutely. It's all about this community concept, and we have well over 1000 companies that we've helped spend smarter, effectively and their community because these customers air sharing both in person and online, best practices, ideas for doing things differently, ideas for stretching this space beyond where it's ever been before, and that's really rewarding and every individual customers getting the benefit from that. Eso This community is developing very, very nicely, and it's serving the purposes of establishing this category, this new category of businessmen management, that world driving toward >> talk about that because that's something that's pretty innovative for Cooper. Business SPEND MANAGEMENT The role of procurement has changed. The role of finance has changed. They have the opportunity to become very strategic and really drive top line value. Talk to us about business, spend management What it means, how Coop is defining it >> absolutely well. First of all, any person I am in the world, and I've been asked this question for well over a decade. Now, do you think your company is doing a great job in managing its spending on older business needs that the company has, and you never get a resounding positive answer that, yes, we're doing a great job. And if you ask them, are you applying information technology to that problem in an effective way? The the answers or even worse? So we are attacking this full on with our customers in establishing the space, and that means everything from procurement expense reporting to invoice processing, two payments strategic sourcing, spend analytics supplier management contract lifecycle management. All of these application areas working together in concert help companies get their arms around spending and manage it in a much more smart way. And that's what this is. This is all about. >> One of the biggest challenges is you think about poor I t. Because every every line of business, whether your marketing, finance or engineering anything. Oh, engineering. I want to use lock. Start using flack. Marketing wants to use salesforce market Whatever these tools are in, suddenly this proliferation of shadowing T that's right and challenging to manage. But you can imagine how many supplier contracts are being duplicated triplicate, ID and even within the same organization, not getting the ideal price. So one of the great things big announcement today is the expansion of the relationship with Amazon in the AWS marketplace and wow, c I ose I t folks are gonna be able to do >> a lot >> through the Cupid platform. Tell us >> girls, that's right. Well, first of all, it's powered by an open by technology that we've developed, which allows you to have a very seamless experience. It's a purchasing experience that feels just like you're out on the Web, looking for any kind of item that you'd like to buy. But now you'll be able to subscribe to Service Is Cloud based. Service is through the Amazon AWS marketplace, and these Air service is that obviously would be approved by your CEO be approved by the folks involved in checking that it's secure, approved by legal and also approved by procurement So you can procure these cloud based service is very, very seamlessly right out of Cooper into AWS marketplace and back. And we think it's going to allow for obviously more volume of controlled spend, but also visibility into that spends. So it's properly matters >> that visibility is. You know, it's a word that we use in so many different applications. We don't want better visibility in our lives. In general, that is not easy to achieve. You talked about kind of these four core categories. You actually mentioned Maur that Cooper delivers its procurement, its invoices, expenses that can imagine travel management contingent workers getting an organization, whether it's a big organization like a staples or a smaller organization, that visibility is massively game changing. >> Yes, I think so. And I think one of the things that allows us to view that is we've really empowered the central hub organizations. Many the ones you described to roll out platforms to the end users all over the country, all over the world, wherever these people have employees to take control over spend. But have that Spence still routed to preferred, contractually righteous kind of spend categories that give them the results that they want. So this is a platform that is getting wide, wide adoption. And I'll tell you one of our application areas. We've seen more than a three x acceleration in the number of users over the last one year simply because of the adoption is so broadly accepted. And that has to do with our design and technology. Make it very, very usable. Our design concept of the best, you wise. No, you are right. So that's really how we're getting to where we're getting with a customer committee >> Adoptions challenging, you know. And there's if you look at the number of applications that an organization has a gonna work our list of sites, there's a lot and they're only effective if they're being utilized effectively by all of the folks that need to be doing that talk a little bit more. I love how you in your general session this morning shared with the audience. What c o u P a. Each acronym means. But and I saw that on the website best. Do I know you? I know what are some of the things that you think Cooper is doing really well that are really facilitating that adoption. That's again, that's hard to achieve. >> Well, it's in each of the letters in Cooper. So first, a comprehensive approach. That's what the C stands for. So cover every area of spend in one platform. We've never seen that before in the history of enterprise software, about a lot of siloed solutions all over the place, people trying to integrate them. We've put this all on one comprehensive platform. Secondly, doing it openly. That's what the old stands for. So being able to integrate to any ear piece system integrates a whole host of systems you mentioned slack earlier. We integrate into slack you could approve or reject spent purchased directly and slack. You have to get out to Cooper to do it, but you're doing it. The date is captured in Cooper. You is the user centrist city, so putting all the weight on the application itself and less of the weight on the employees themselves. Right now, we support guided buying with support all these capabilities, but our focus is on. You don't need any guidance in the future. Should require in the gun she should be. It should be so intuitive. The P stands for prescriptive, and this is using this community. Data we were discussing earlier to give real prescriptive advice. Teach customer, but how they should be spending or best practices, expenditures or benchmarks of how they could approve in the A stands for accelerated. It's the time of deployment. We're getting our customers live in a matter of months. They're accelerating their business process internally. I shared a stat that our customers in the last 12 months have improved the speed of their approvals by 30%. That's an aggregate. That's millions of millions, hundreds of billions of dollars in spend buying. So these five there is really differentiate us and they're really the vision areas that we focus on is a company with our with our community of customers. >> I was looking at some of the numbers from Cooper. You guys have consistently managed to grow revenues over 40% your rear in your fiscal year. 20 Q one earnings, which was just what last month or so. So revenue up 44% year over. You're crushing Wall Street's estimates by more than a 10 point gap. Lot of moment in, As you mentioned, let's talk about customers because at the end of the day, that's what you're all working towards. I know some of your proudest moments are when you get to talk with customers whose businesses have been transformed and you're giving them that the ah ha moments all the time. I love this morning how there >> was a lot >> of the voice of the customer covered there from so many different industries. The impact that you guys are making it Rolls Royce, for example, and MasterCard massive. Tell me some of your favorite stories that really articulate the breadth and depth of the value that delivers. I >> love it when the story begins in a situation where the CEO or CFO of the company don't necessarily get it, but somebody within our community steps up and shows them the business case of what we could achieve together. And then we, as a team is a collective unit delivered on achieving. Looking at was on themselves. I mean, they're processing more than $2,000,000,000 a month >> through our platform. I >> mentioned Procter Gamble. It process more than $50,000,000,000. Star Platform. Now >> these air, >> not initials. These were early adopter customers. They didn't have to go in our direction. There was some individual in that company that saw the spark of opportunity seized it, got it approved and worked with us hand in hand to drive it. And that's the stories that I love the most. And I shared so many of them this morning, but there are literally hundreds of them. All over the world in this community were cultivated. >> There are, and it's that's I think there's no bread or brand value that you can get Van it being articulated from the voice of a successful customer who it's not just normal, agile. We're saving money. It's no, we're driving shareholder value. There are significant business imperatives that are being driven because procurement is changing. We got to react to pricing pressures and forces like consumer ization. You know, we think of way have these expectations as consumers private lives, of getting anything that we want within a day when it shows up, you forgot what you ordered. It was that fast. That's right, what you guys are doing to enable the business buyers to have that same capability in their business lives. But to get that visibility, that 360 is really interesting. >> And the key also is to handle all the complexity on the back end for them. I could tell you so many companies I know that a really proud of crossing their paper based invoices very, very quickly, but they may not even know whether or not they got the goods of service is for which they're paying the invoice. So we do all of that heavy lifting on the back end on the platform itself, alleviating then users from that complexity and allowing them to have the experience that's similar to the one that that you just described >> can imagine how much money is being wasted on paper. They probably have absolutely no idea, absolutely no idea where you guys launched an Index. The Cooper Business Spend Index Just, I think, a month or two ago this is behavioral based data that you're bleeding from your community. Talk to us about the coupe of business spent index and some of the insights that you're already uncovering about the economy. >> Absolutely so. One of the things about this business spending nexus. It's something I've been thinking about frankly for over a decade. Can we collect enough data that's statistically significant enough actually be a leading indicator to future economic sentiment. You think about the data. We're looking at an aggregate. We know the average spend companies have per employee. We know how long approval cycles are, and we know the changes in those approval cycles. We know what percentage of spend is actually being rejected. Verse accepted at a moments notice aggregated those air in combination are leading in the Kidder's to the sentiment that companies have about the future of the economy. So we backwards tested this index that takes an account, these three elements that just described back to 2016 and it's proven to show pretty strong correlation with the way the economy actually played out for many of those quarters that many of those quarters. So last quarter we released our first verse, our first data set of the business spending. Next. And it showed that future economic economic sentiment for the next 3 to 4 months is actually very positive now, in some industries, more than others. But now, with three months later and clearly, the last three months have been pretty strong. So we're gonna be soon releasing our next quarterly Businessmen index. And we're gonna be doing this every quarter. Try to provide the business community with insights about where things are going. That's what everyone of business wants to know, where things are going, not where things have been. And we think we're in a unique position to share that and also, you know, sort of unfairly build awareness for brand out there so that people understand >> what we're all about. >> But that's that's critical. I'm gonna be talking to China tomorrow. You think of awareness Acquisition? Yes, Yes. Advocacy. Yes. Check, Check. Check. Old three. Those are critical last question robbery. As we look at the impact that procurement and getting this visibility of all of the distances spend can have on the business. Where is it as it relates to enabling businesses to digitally transformed >> to be competitive? Well, look, underlying all of this is the digital transformation that's happening for every company in every industry, without a doubt. But the use cases we support us so quantifiable. That's so clear not only in terms of cost savings that only in terms of compliance only in terms of visibility and getting your arms around spent actually drive revenue as well. If you do spend management effectively, you can change the way consumers experience your brand. And I shared a number of those stories. MGM resorts to Lulu Lemon to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and others. If you can get your arms around the spent and get people in the company, the goods and service is they need in record time. They're better position to express the company's vision to help them push towards an incredible iconic customer experiences. And we're just so proud to be ableto power that for this fast growing community of customers around the world, >> such an exciting time. Rob, thank you for having to queue, but inspired 19. It's been great. It's for looking forward to talking with lots more of your of your folks as well as amazing innovators and thinkers like Susie Orman and Deepak Chopra. Wow. Awesome stuff. Thank you. Well, thanks for having us. Thank you. All right. For Rob Bernstein. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from Cooper Inspired 19. Thanks for watching.

(fast intro music) >> Narrator: From London England, it's the Cube, covering Coupa Inspire 19 EMEA. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey, welcome to The Cube. Lisa Martin coming to you from Coupa Inspire 19 in London. Pleased to welcome one of Coupa's spend setters, joining me now is James Wagstaff, the chief procurement officer of Provident. James, welcome to the Cube. >> Hello, Lisa, nice to be here. >> So you had a very busy day. Thank you for taking some time to talk to me about Provident, what you doing with Coupa. But give our audience an overview of Provident and what you guys do and deliver to your customers. >> Very good, so Provident is a ftse 250 UK financial services business. It lends money to people without access to mainstream lending. Um, so it's real focus is to do that in a responsible, caring way. So if you can't borrow money from Barclays or HSBC, then Provident is a company that will help you get back to access to that mainstream market. >> Individuals as well as like small businesses? >> Consumers, around two million people in the UK currently use Provident, either the credit card or our home credit or our car leasing business. >> Okay, so how long have you been there? >> I have been at Provident now since April of 2018. >> Okay. >> So we're coming up now to, I think 19 months, and we put Coupa into the bank, which is the credit card business in April or April/May. >> Okay talk to me, though, about about your journey in business and finance. One of the things I read about you is that you were encouraged from an early age to really understand all aspects of a business from operations to finance to marketing to truly provide value through procurement. Talk to me about the history there that you have. >> So I'm a big fan of mentor programs. So I think everyone should have a mentor, and I lucked into mine, a chap called Terry, who, for reasons best known to him, took me under his wing. I was quite old when I came to procurement. I was around late 20s, maybe 30, and he had a vision about what great procurement looked like, and it was a holistic view. So procurement at its worst can be very tactical, very cost focused, and Terry was very focused on the bigger picture, about top-line growth not just bottom line, and right from day one, he seeded that in me, and it's been the strength of my career. So I owe Terry, Terry Western, if he's watching, I owe Terry, I owe Terry everything for that. And then I spent the last 10 years as an expat. So prior to Provident, I had three years as the group CPI for VimpelCom, which is the Russian equivalent of Vodafone or AT&T, who have businesses throughout Soviet Union, CIS, and Asia-Pac. And then seven years with Huawei, who are China's largest private company, telecoms company, and I was traveling around the world on the sales side facing procurement. So that was a very sobering enlightening experience to see procurement from the supplier side of the table, and I think it's made me a different procurement person as a result in terms of the way the I treat people and relate to people. So that holistic nature combined with, I think, a very business-centric view of what procurement should do. >> Interesting, though, that you that you said, I got a late start in procurement, but your start was founded upon someone giving you very solid advice of look beyond that because this is an element of the business that can, somebody that clearly was seeing how transformative, but also how it was important for procurement to partner and understand different requirements and needs within each division within an organization, so it sounds like you didn't really grow up in that traditional siloed approach of procurement. >> I did not, and I think that for me it makes my life interesting. So I think if you're in procurement and the danger is you become quite siloed, you're very narrow, and I did my MBA quite recently while I was traveling just to get that bigger perspective. It makes the job fun. I mean, I think you know you can negotiate contract after contract after contract, but it's the context of what that's doing for the business. And I think when I looked at Coupa as a system, it was with that in mind. So looking at Coupa, not from the perspective of what it did for procurement, but how it was for end-user customers. So as a service, was it really, really simple to use? Did it feel like an Amazon shopping experience? Because that drives adoption, and if you can get people wanting to use the system because it's easy, then the data's in the system, and then the data's in the system you can do something with it. So you're not, you're not fighting that adoption issue that you would be on a lot of systems. So if you go to some of the big ERP systems, they can be really hard for people to change and adopt, and Coupa's not been like that. It's been relatively easy. >> Interesting that you talk about it as it needs to be as simple as an Amazon marketplace. As consumers we're so used to that, right. I mean, people transact daily and get fulfillment of whatever product or service they're ordering from Amazon within... Sometimes it's within an hour or two. So we have this expectation and this demand. To your point, though, about wanting to have software that would be as easy for your teams to take up, that consumer effect. Talk to me about that as an influence. Because you know, kind of right away experience with other systems that might be bigger legacy systems that are challenging to get folks to use because they're not that intuitive. Did you know right away when you came into Provident that I need to have something that is more consumer-like. >> I knew that we needed a system and because as a regulated industry, we had to control our spend. So the fact that we needed a procurement system was a given, so then the choice is what do you buy? I think you don't really need a big ERP unless you really want to spend a lot of money on assistant inspirations and complexity. So your then into the mid-market space. And, um, there's a lot of vendors out there that have had an on-premise model, been around a long time, but you can feel that when you use it. So I didn't do a paper-based RFP. I think this is probably a terrible way of evaluating systems because you can get a function list on paper, but that doesn't really tell you what it's like to use. So the procurement process was around video online demos. So getting users into the room, three hours for an online demo walk through the system. So it's a very non-traditional procurement process to buy a procurement system. And I think at the end of that, I think it was a more valuable process for it. >> Was that something that was driven by you or was that something that was driven by Coupa? Is that how they deliver that type of experience? >> It was driven by me, but I think it was welcomed by Coupa. I think, I think from the sales guys I think they do an awful lot of paper-based RFP, and I think it's a challenge because it's very hard to differentiate on paper. Actually, a lot of the systems kind of do the same stuff, but it's not what they do. It's how they do it. And you can't, you can't get that out of the paper. You have to see it and feel it and touch it. >> Exactly. One of the things that Rob Bernshteyn talks about, and he spoke about it this morning, is that the best UI is no UI. And he really talked about what they've done to be user-centric and talked proudly about the adoption that they've had. And you know, it's... We all know whatever software you're putting in an organization, all these, you know, whether its marketing, finance, operation, sales, if people aren't going to use it, it's not going to be able to deliver the value that whoever purchased it and brought it on needs it to do. Talk to me about that user-centric. Did you see and feel that right away in those demos? >> I think if you're a procurement guy, you have suppliers every day send you certain messages, and those messages are fairly consistent around, you know, delivering value and solutions. I mean, Rob's great. He's a bit of a force of nature. Um, you got to say that. But what I like about it is that he's got a very clear sense of vision about what the system should be, and I think he's done a great job of getting that throughout the company, top to bottom. And to date we've felt that. So normally what happens is you buy the software license, you sign the agreement, there's lots of love and care, and then kind of the vendor disappears a little bit, and you're on your own. And to date, Coupa done a great job. We got Damian Pinnell, who's our success manager. I get the sense that he really cares about whether the system is going to do what it promised to do. And how do we get more value out of it? Some of it is about selling more licenses because Coupa have got other modules they want you to buy, but that's kind of okay if the modules are delivering more value, then you don't mind paying for them. But even the modules we own, there is a real sense of are you exploiting it to the max? And that's pretty cool. >> What are some of the key values that you have gleaned so far in just the, what, maybe six months or so that you guys have been using the platform? >> So I'm getting, I'm quite surprised at the extent to the insights, the value I'm getting out of the insights. So as an example, and I'll be honest. Coupa told me that said your, your spend-through catalog is 27% and your industry top quartile is 95. And I kind of went, "Nah, I don't believe you." And then they said, "Your electronic invoicing could be 77%, and you're currently single digits." And I went, "Nah, I don't believe you." And then through the community we spoke to Co-Oper, another Coupa customer, and Marley there was saying, "No, we're doing it. We're at this. "We're at 95% or 97% even." And I went "Well, how are you doing it?" And she just talked me through how they sell it to suppliers and how, in my head, the reluctance to adopt actually evaporated because she was able to sell the idea to suppliers, sell the value as. She didn't force them to do it. She just said this is what you're going to get out of it if you do it this way, and she's genuinely got to 97. So what it's done for me is it's remove my own blockers in my own mind, you know, in my own head "You can't do this." Well, insights and speaking to other communities. Yes, I can. So it's opened my, changed my targets, changed what I think is possible. And I think that's cool. >> You look back to the beginning of your journey in procurement, business, and finance, when you were given this great advice, like "Be open-minded, understand how different parts of the business work," from then to where you are now and what you're able to deliver, in just a short time, leveraging Coupa, would have believed you'd been able to go from there to there? >> Uh, yeah, so Terry would always say to me, you know, if you're going to negotiate a deal, before you even pick up a contract, you would spend an hour with the business owner or the techie or whoever it is, and you just white board, at a technical level, what the solution is. I think that, years and years and years of doing that, of going deeper into technology and software and integration and through deal after deal after deal, when you come to run the project, to implement Coupa, you have that as a foundation. So you're not just at the surface and relying on other technical people because you're lost when you get to this level of detail. You've already got a little bit more depth. So I think that was the big spin-off, in a way. That you're able to have more in-depth conversations at a technical level, which you need to unblock stuff. >> So some of the news that came out today. They talked about what they're doing to expand Coupa Pay with American Express. I was just talking with Barclays. Barclays card been on that for a little while. Looking at the payment space for instance, on the BDC side, we have this expectation as consumers. We can do any transaction, we can pay bills. It hasn't been as... On the B2B side, it hasn't been as innovative. Some technology gaps, large scale. Where do you see Coupa in that respect with what they're doing with Coupa Pay? Do you see that influence from the consumer side that might eventually become an important part of what you're able to do at Provident? >> We haven't enabled Coupa Pay, so I'm in a position to talk authoritatively about it. >> In terms of taking the consumer and demand? >> So I look at the one-time-use credit cards, and I'm really quite excited about what that could do, and I kind of get the business sense and the use case behind that. So that's certainly on our radar. I like the risk-aware products as well, using the big data and AI stuff. So, there's a few things in the road map I've got my eye on. We're deploying expenses module in December/January, so that'll keep us busy on that. And then we'll need to route six months of data through Coupa so that we've got enough of a data pool to do the analytics. So we've got a busy road map, that's for sure. >> For a last question for you, James, for peers of yours, whether they're in financial services industry or not that are facing similar challenges and opportunities to transform procurement, what's you're best advice? >> Mmm, go and spend a few years as a supplier. I think procurement suffers a little bit from people who have only ever been in procurement. And I think that different perspective would be enormously powerful. So I think if we could get more marketing people, more lawyers, more different people and different professions into procurement, I think it would give you a broader perspective rather than a "I've grown up in procurement the last 20 years" sort of perspective. So go and get that holistic, global view would be my suggestion. >> Well, James, that's great advice for anybody, anywhere, and I'm sure Terry would be proud to hear you say that. >> I'm sure he would. >> Thank you so much for joining me on The Cube and sharing with us what Provident is doing with Coupa. We appreciate your time. >> It's been a real pleasure. Thank you, Lisa. >> Excellent. To James Wagstaff, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching The Cube from Coupa Inspire 19. Thanks for watching. (computerized tune)

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

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