Archive for November, 2006

It doesn’t take Albert Einstein to figure out startups and SaaS are a tough combination. Customers want a rock solid, reliable hosting infrastructure — and most startups are still trying to figure out which colo least resembles a yo-yo.

For the last few months I’ve been delighted by our progress in developing the Coupa SaaS infrastructure. We can now offer near-instantaneous build-up and tear-down of Coupa eProcurement instances. It’s neither single nor multi-tenant, but instead a hybrid that we intend to talk about at a later date.

Currently we use our infrastructure for the online enterprise demos which have grown so popular of late. (And hey, they absolutely are a great way to check out our latest and greatest, complete with rich demo data.)

Demand has been strong enough on the demo front to have us searching for a solution that would enable better burst data through-put and a greater ability to scale to a higher volume of customers. So we’ve been evaluating the Amazon EC2 service.

It’s far from perfect but it’s a really great concept. We gain the flexibility to expand and contract usage without a large fixed cost. But better still, Coupa’s SaaS customers gain the peace of mind of knowing the same fault-tolerant, reliable infrastructure that powers Amazon.com is working for them. Cool beans.

Hi All! I’m Noah Eisner and figured I would start my first blog posting with an introduction. My primary role at Coupa is to design the product. However, being a small team, I get my hands on pretty much everything from running the finances (i knew there was a reason to take Intro to Accounting in college) to buying and putting together furniture. Startups are fun When Dave and I first put together plans for Coupa, we scoped out our product vision and plans. But, more importantly, we talked about what kind of company we wanted to create. First and foremost, we wanted to be more transparent than typical enterprise software companies. We’d just rather have an informed prospect, customer, partner, etc. Hopefully, you’ve accessed or participated in some of the ways that we’ve tried to make Coupa more transparent: the Coupa Open Source on Sourceforge, free documentation, free trials of Coupa Enterprise, Coupa Forums, Coupa Wiki and now the Coupa Blogs.

I’ll be posting blog entries on a variety of topics, but I’m going to start with a series of video blogs that will walk you through some of the capabilities in Coupa. Expect the first entry this week. And, of course, if you have a topic that you’d like discussed, leave a comment. Thanks!

I got some feedback on the notification alerts that appear in the top bar of our application. We keep a running count of “unvisited” notifications. But to at least one person, that was confusing. They tried the enteprise demo, logged on as Jack, submitted a Req, then logged in as Sally to approve. They clicked on the req – but then something came up and they needed to close the browser window. By the time they picked the process back up, the “(1)” next to the envelope in the top bar was gone, leading the user to think the notification itself had disappeared.

We’re setting up our translation infrastructure for Coupa eProcurement. As we’ve been deep in design discussions I’ve been reflecting on the technical differences between National Language Support, or NLS, and Multiple Language Support, or MLS. They both start with externalized strings for prompts and field titles. But MLS adds the complexity of worrying about entered data, not just prompts. A typical rule is to take all the content that could be sent to a supplier – from Item Description to UOM to the Supplier name itself – and including an optional placeholder for typing in multiple values, one for each language.. But doing that and keeping the application simple for single-language customers is really tough. So we’ve yet to decide whether Coupa will offer MLS or just stick to NLS.

The Coupa Team is happy to share Coupa eProcurement Release 3. It’s freshly baked and still warm over on Sourceforge. Sample it today!

The release contains functional additions such as Self-service Receiving and Requester-Initiated New Supplier Requests. We’ve also included User Interface Improvements: new button styling, calendar widget, table headers and paging. Finally, we’ve upgraded Ferret (search engine) from 0.9 -> 0.10.

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. But our Open Source Procurement radio signal is now live and on the air. We’ll be taking you through our latest features and filling you in on what’s happening “behind the scenes”. I hope you find the information interesting and useful. Welcome to Coupa!

-Dave