From the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE, covering Coupa Inspire 2019. Brought to you by Coupa. Welcome to theCUBE from Coupa Inspire, 1999, Lisa Martin in the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. And guess who I have with me? From the main stage, CEO Rob Bernstein. Rob, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Exciting start to day 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. Two, you like kittens and cute pictures of kittens. I do. And three, since 2016, there has been a 5X increase in the spend going through the Coupa platform. That's right. Rocket ship. That's right, huge momentum. We're well over $1.2 trillion in spend that's gone through the platform. It's accelerating and our customers are getting a lot of value in visualizing that spend and routing it to prefer contracts, saving money, doing it 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 that Coupa has to be able to get that visibility and control of all their spend. That's really revolutionary for any business. Well, we're really excited about it. Our community of customers is very excited about it. We're building something very special here. I'll tell you, one of the most exciting things is when you see that data being used in a way that drives intelligence for each individual customer. You know, we're helping them understand where is their potential fraud with their expenses? Where are their suppliers maybe sending them duplicate invoices by accident, but our AI picks that up. So we are taking this space to a completely new level and it's, it couldn't be more exciting, honestly. Well, the amount, you know, we go to a million shows a year, maybe a little bit less. But, and 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 and foremost, so you need AI capabilities to do that. You have to access a massive data store. You have to anonymize the data. Obviously, it needs to be very, very secure. And then you have to draw insights out of that data. And one of the things I shared 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 AI, but it's AI as the underlying element that brings out what we call community intelligence. And that's what's so powerful. And the community as well, another really kind of undertone that I felt and heard this morning for me was this, it's a community of collaboration. These are other businesses benefiting from what others have learned suppliers as well. So the customer centricity, the supplier centricity is there. Absolutely, it's all about this community concept. And we have well over a thousand companies that we've helped spend smarter effectively. And they're community because these customers are sharing both in person and online, best practices, ideas for doing things differently, ideas for stretching the space beyond where it's ever been before. And that's really rewarding and every individual customer is getting the benefit from that. So this community is developing very, very nicely and it's serving the purposes of establishing this category, this new category of business spend management that we're all driving toward. Talk about that, because that's something that's pretty innovative for Coupa, 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 Coupa is defining it. Absolutely, well first of all, any person I ask in the world, and I've been asking this question for well over a decade now, do you think your company is doing a great job in managing its spending on all the 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 answers are even worse. So we are attacking this full on with our customers in establishing the space. That means everything from procurement, to expense reporting, to invoice processing, to payments, strategic sourcing, spend analytics, supplier management, contract life cycle management, all of these application areas working together in concert to help companies get their arms around spending and manage it in a much more smart way. And that's what this is all about. One of the biggest challenges is you think about poor IT because every line of business, whether you're in marketing or finance or engineering, or engineering might say, I want to use Slack. Let's just start using Slack. Marketing wants to use Salesforce, whatever these tools are, and suddenly there's this proliferation of shadow IT. That's right. And challenging to manage, but you can imagine how many supplier contracts are being duplicated, triplicated, 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 and the AWS Marketplace. And wow, CIOs, IT folks are going to be able to do a lot through the Coupit platform. Tell us a little bit more about this. Well, first of all, it's powered by an open buy 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 services, cloud-based services, through the Amazon AWS Marketplace. And these are services that obviously would be approved by your CIO, be approved by the folks involved in checking that it's secure, approved by legal, and also approved by procurement. So you can then procure these cloud-based services very, very seamlessly right out of Coupa 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 spend so it's properly managed. That visibility is, you know, it's a word that we use in so many different applications. We all 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 more that Coupa delivers its procurement, its invoices, expenses, I can imagine, travel management, contingent worker. 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 do that is we've really empowered these central hub organizations, many of 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 spend 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, you know, in one of our application areas, we've seen more than a 3x acceleration in the number of users over the last one year simply because 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 UI is no UI, right? So that's really how we're getting to where we're getting with our customer community. Adoption is challenging, you know, and there's, if you look at the number of applications that an organization has, again, work regardless of size, 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 COUPA, each acronym means, and I saw that on the website, the best UI is no UI. That's right. What are some of the things that you think Koopa is doing really well that are really facilitating that adoption? Because that's again, that's hard to achieve. Well, it's in each of the letters in COUPA. 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. We've had a lot of siloed solutions all over the place. People are trying to integrate them. We've put this all on one comprehensive platform. Secondly, doing it openly. That's what the O stands for. So being able to integrate to any ERP system, integrate to a whole host of systems. You mentioned Slack earlier. We integrate into Slack. You could approve or reject a spend purchase directly in Slack. You don't have to get out to Koopa to do it, but you're doing it. The data's captured in Koopa. U is the user centricity. So putting all the weight on the application itself and less of the weight on the employee themselves, right? Now we support guided buying. We support all these capabilities, but our focus is on, you don't need any guidance in the future. You shouldn't require any guidance. You 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 to each customer about how they should be spending or best practices of 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 processes 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 and millions and hundreds of billions of dollars in spend volume. So these five areas really differentiate us and they're really the vision areas that we focus on as a company with our community of customers. I was looking at some of the numbers from Koopa. You guys have consistently managed to grow revenues over 40% year-over-year in your fiscal year 20 Q1 earnings, which was just what last month or so. Revenue up 44% year-over-year, crushing Wall Street's estimates by more than a 10 point gap. A lot of momentum 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 those aha moments all the time. I loved 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 at 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 Koopa 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 get to achieve together and within we as a team, as a collective unit, deliver it and achieve it. So you look at Amazon themselves, I mean they're processing more than $2 billion a month through our platform. I mentioned Procter & Gamble. They processed more than $50 billion to our platform. Now these are not initiatives. 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 we're cultivating. There are and it's, that's I think there's no better brand value that you can get than it being articulated from the voice of a successful customer who it's not just, oh we're more 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've got to react to pricing pressures and forces like consumerization. We have these expectations as consumers in our private lives of getting anything that we want within a day and when it shows up you forgot what you ordered it was that fast. 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 can tell you so many companies I know that are really proud of processing their paper based invoices very, very quickly but they may not even know whether or not they got the goods and services for which they're paying the invoice. So we do all of that heavy lifting on the back end on the platform itself, alleviating the end users from that complexity and allowing them to have the experience that's similar to the one that you just described. Can you imagine how much money is being wasted on paper? They probably have absolutely no idea. Absolutely no idea. Well you guys launched an index, the Koopa Business Spend Index, just I think a month or two ago. This is behavioral based data that you're gleaning from your community. Talk to us about the Koopa Business Spend Index and some of the insights that you're already uncovering about the economy. Absolutely. So one of the things about this Business Spend Index is it's something that I've been thinking about frankly for over a decade. Can we collect enough data that's statistically significant enough to actually be a leading indicator to future economic sentiment? Now you think about the data we're looking at in Agriot. 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 versus accepted at a moment's notice, aggregated. Those are in combination are leading indicators to the sentiment that companies have about the future of the economy. So we backwards tested this index that takes into account these three elements I just described back to 2016. And it's proven to show a pretty strong correlation with the way the economy actually played out for many of those quarters, many of those quarters. So last quarter we released our first data set of the Business Spend Index and it showed that future economic sentiment for the next three to four months is actually very positive. Now in some industries more than others. But now we're three months later and clearly the last three months have been pretty strong. So we're going to be soon releasing our next quarterly Business Spend Index and we're going to be doing this every quarter to try to provide the business community with insights about where things are going. That's what everyone in 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 sort of unfairly build awareness for our brand out there so that people understand what we're all about. But that's critical. I'm going to be talking to Chandra tomorrow when we think of awareness acquisition. Yes, yes, advocacy, yes. Check, check, check, all three of those are critical. Last question we're up for you is we look at the impact that procurement and getting this visibility of all of the businesses spend can have on the business. Where is it as it relates to enabling businesses to digitally transform 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 is so quantifiable. They're so clear, not only in terms of cost savings, not only in terms of compliance, not only in terms of visibility and getting your arms around spend, they 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 from MGM Resorts to Lulu Lemon to the leukemia and lymphoma society and others. If you can get your arms around the spend and get people in the company the goods and services they need in record time, they are better positioned to express the company's vision to help them push towards an incredible iconic customer experiences. And we're just so proud to be able to power that for this fast growing community of customers around the world. Such an exciting time Rob. Thank you for having theCUBE at Inspire 19. It's been great so far looking forward to talking with lots more of your folks as well as amazing innovators and thinkers like Suzy 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 theCUBE from Coupa Inspire 19. Thanks for watching.