PayStream Advisors is attending a two-day conference hosted by Coupa, a leading provider of cloud-based financial applications, in San Francisco, CA today and tomorrow. This morning’s keynote session was led by Rob Bernshteyn, Coupa’s CEO, and was a powerful story of how Coupa sought to empower procurement and finance professionals to be leaders in their organizations.

Mr. Bernshteyn explained that businesses are often too focused on revenue and ignore spend as a source of process improvement. Coupa took advantage of that and built their platform to garner real strategic movement in spend optimization. He also remarked that vision and strategy alone are nothing, quoting Henry Ford saying, “Vision without execution is just Hallucination.” He went on to describe the painstaking dedication and effort that went into the execution of Coupa and the company they are today.

The struggles and challenges Coupa faced are common themes among many organizations. True process improvement means more than trying to fix or emulate a potentially broken or convoluted bureaucratic process that may already exist in the company because that is the way it has always been done—it means taking the opportunity to rethink a process; to employ a technology that will actually optimize the way things work within an organization. Mr. Bernshteyn said that stellar AP Managers, Procurement Professionals, and CFOs work as enablers to a company. Often these departments are seen as bureaucratic offices that slow others down—through process improvement these departments can support sales, marketing, customer support and others. Mr. Bernshteyn said that the key to being an enabler is to keep things simple just as Coupa has done with their solution.

Mr. Bernshteyn’s motivational speech included the announcement of several strategic partnerships that will further Coupa’s reach, improve their product, and increase customer satisfaction. Teaming up with Alibaba.com, a leading platform for cross-border wholesale trade serving millions of buyers and suppliers around the globe, Coupa now offers its users access to over 2 million suppliers worldwide. With an increase in the supplier network comes an increase in competition and thus a better supplier, product, and experience for Coupa users.

Coupa has also recently partnered with Box, a leading cloud-based content management and file sharing provider. With more and more data being stored on the cloud, Coupa wants to be an early implementer of the functionality before it becomes the status quo. Mr. Bernshteyn also announced Coupa has partnered with DocuSign. DocuSign is a provider of electronic signature technology and Digital Transaction Management services for facilitating electronic exchanges of contracts and signed documents. Incorporating DocuSign technology into the Coupa platform will expedite critical processes that require a genuine and verifiable signature.

Coupa already provides Coupa Analytics that allows users to view reports based on transactions within their platform. Partnering with Keboola, a custom data extraction and mashup company, Coupa is going to expand its analytical capabilities to include the ability to import data from external sources, such as payroll or direct spend data. Doing so will allow users to see what is happening in spend throughout their entire organization.

Mr. Bernshteyn’s final announcement today was that as of last week Coupa is now SAP certified. He ended his keynote address with what he feels differentiates Coupa from their competitors and what continues to lead to success—sticking to spend management. Coupa isn’t hampered by the diversification that may slow some of their competitors down; they aren’t burdened by also offering human capitol management or customer relation management. They’re focus is and will continue to be spend optimization management. Mr. Bernshteyn boasted of now having 423 customers representing 154 countries with support for 20 languages and 148 currencies. He also stated thatCoupa now processes over 500,000 transactions daily with 99.99% uptime that has led to a customer savings of almost 2 billion dollars for its customers.

The partnerships that were announced today will only further increase Coupa’s reach into the global marketplace. PayStream is very excited to see how these relationships flourish and the results they will bring. We hear that, while today brought the announcement of Coupa’s new partnerships, tomorrow will be one of new functionalities and we can’t wait to share with you our experiences. Stay tuned for part 2 tomorrow.