Better late than never

Add comment June 16th, 2006 David Bush - Iasta

Unfortunately, I missed the timeliness for Dave Stephens new venture, Coupa. For those that read blogs, you know that Dave runs Procurement Central, which is a great source of information. He was kind enough to give me advance warning of his announcement but I was on vacation and could not post last week on it.

I also had a long conversation yesterday with Dave to get more understanding of Coupa and, needless to say, it is very exciting and interesting. I am really looking forward to some one of Dave’s intellect and experience to add more value to software solutions for this industry. Credible and valuable software is a rising tide that lifts all ships. Read Dave’s email and summary below and look for more about this soon.

copy for Iasta-

My New Venture

Today I’m announcing what many of you have been anticipating for some time - my new venture. It’s called “Coupa”, and it’s been operating in stealth mode for a few months now. Our small crew consists entirely of “Top Guns” from the Oracle Advanced Procurement team. It would be fair to say as a group we’ve designed & built quite a few Procurement products over the years. And we’ve come away with some pretty interesting beliefs that we now intend to test in the market.

At Coupa, we believe open source is the future of enterprise software. To that end, we intend to introduce best-in-class Procurement products at absolute rock bottom TCO based entirely on an open source technology stack. Our first product, a new take on eProcurement, will be available this July.

Why eProcurement and how is it different? I’ll delay answering these rather important questions for now. Suffice it to say those we’ve shared it with are saying things like “now why didn’t I think of that?!”

On the technology front, the Coupa team knows all too well today’s enterprise software is overly complicated, heavyweight, and yawn-inspiring. Our open source alternative aims to be the antithesis - lightweight, easy to deploy, and fun.

We expect to offer the software via traditional download and via SaaS. In the end, we believe you should retain choice on how you deploy your software.

Via open source, we will look to our partners and customers to help shape our products. We look forward to seeding the Coupa open source project & to growing an open source community around the Coupa initiative.

I encourage you to register on the Coupa website to receive our latest news. And here’s a new email address you can reach me at: dave at coupa dot com. We’d love to hear from parties interested in engaging in our open source projects. In addition, we have a few openings for early adopter customers who can engage with us in an advisory role. Finally, we’d love to connect with SI’s specializing in either open source or Procurement.

I am planning to continue to operate Procurement Central as a separate blogging conversation from Coupa. It will afford me the opportunity to continue to recount my Oracle experiences, as well as touch upon the current trends I’m seeing in Procurement. And now I can add news on the start-up & also be able to share the technology and functionality choices we’re making.

Thanks to all of you who pushed me to get off the beach and do this. I’m grateful for your support and encouragement & hope Coupa will eventually live up to your high expectations!

Entry Filed under: General, Interviews, Technology / SaaS, e-Sourcing Marketplace