Back on September 18th, 2008 in a post titled “Moving Procurement Practice Beyond Adjunct Complexity” I gave a review of the Coupa solution. I outlined in detail why I believed that the company would become a major player in the then not too distant future. Sharing the news of my belief in the company’s inevitable rise to prominence even extended beyond the electronic pages of this blog to include the virtual airwaves of my show on Blog Talk Radio – remember the June 2009 segment Emerging Giants: The New Titans of the SaaS World. Even industry players such as SAP tuned in to hear that one.
In short, it was clearly evident to me that Coupa and similar discontinuous innovation-type companies were ultimately going to become market changers. This was something that was desperately needed in an industry that had been struggling to deliver on the promise of eProcurement technologies.
Of course not everyone agreed with me.
This is what makes yesterday’s Spend Matters UK/Europe Post “Coupa Roadshow hits London next week!” most interesting – especially since it came across my desk via the Coupa Forum on LinkedIn.
In trumpeting Coupa’s One Vision road show that is scheduled to hit London on October 10th, Peter Smith extols the virtues of the Coupa offering with “his” assertion that the company has been a major “disruptive” force in the purchase to pay / spend management software world over the last 3 years or so. He then directs his readers to check out his US colleague Jason Busch’s latest article regarding the release of Coupa’s new sourcing product.
So why is this interesting?
Well it was almost 3 years ago that Jason took offense (in writing I might add) to my assessment that he had missed the mark when he questioned amongst other things, the viability of the Coupa model in his comparison with Ariba. 3 years ago . . . hmmmmmm . . . isn’t that about the same time that Smith suggests that Coupa first became a disruptive force? Perhaps while offended, Jason was actually listening to what I was saying.
Nothing like picking the winner after the race has been run . . .
In the context of my post yesterday (It’s the end of the world as we know it . . . at least for traditional analyst firms and bloggers), what the above stroll down memory lane provides is the verification as to why traditional analysts and bloggers are continuing to lose creditability with a market that is no longer content to simply follow the pay for praise advice of ersatz experts whose objectivity can at times be questionable.
Now if only we could get an answer as to why, in his recent flurry of posts dedicated to the SciQuest acquisition of CombineNet, Jason failed to mention the fact that the vendor just lost major contracts with both Oregon and Colorado. Perhaps I may be off the mark here but, I kind of think that the market and in particular prospective customers might find this kind of information useful.
Oh well, I guess that no matter how much things change, they stay same, or as my mother used to say . . . a leopard cannot change its spots.
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Procurement Insights 
Procurify
October 3, 2013
Coupa has started to change the market for the past few years. I think a lot of writers are hesitant to make predictions so they wait to see what happens. After all hindsight has 20/20 vision.
I believe a big reason eProcurement technologies have struggled in the past is because many of the potential customers are slow to move or don’t believe their ad hoc systems need modernization. Here’s a free white paper to why it might be time to find a better solution to managing company purchasing.
http://procurify.com/better-procurement-practices
piblogger
October 3, 2013
Thank you for sharing you’re thoughts and the link to your white paper Matt.
Here is the question . . . why should there be any hesitation to write about something if you have done your research and have a clear understanding of where the market is likely heading. You merely have to go back to the SIIA 2000 white paper about which I wrote in a recent article (https://procureinsights.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/why-mickey-north-rizza-cant-go-home-again-or-can-she/) to see that this shift was on the horizon long before 2010.
Or to put it another way, when you truly understand the subject matter about which you are writing, you move from the realms of having to “predict” the future to one in which you understand what (and why) anticipated changes are likely to occur.
No doubt, and has I had written in my post yesterday, while the end user must bear some of the responsibility for the challenges and failures in the past, the brunt of the responsibility must be born by the analysts and the vendors they covered. Here is the link to that post (I of course welcome any additional comments you might have); https://procureinsights.wordpress.com/2013/10/02/its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-at-least-for-traditional-analyst-firms-and-bloggers-by-jon-hansen/