Business & Technology Nexus

Today, June 6th 2006, 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 joining 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.

I’m grateful to so many of my former customers & colleagues (as well as my new friends) for your support and wise counsel. Thanks for your help and encouragement – now it’s time to see what we can do!