 Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of CUPA Inspire 2022 at the Cosmopolitan in bustling Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin and very pleased to be welcomed back. One of our CUPA alumni, the chairman and CEO of CUPA, the man himself, Rob Bernstein. Rob, great to have you back on the program. Great to be with you again. It's great to be in person. I applaud CUPA for taking the risk and getting all the people here. People are absolutely ready for this. And if there's a company that brings the energy, it's CUPA. Well, thank you for saying that. We're definitely feeling it. You're right. We took a bit of a risk when we opened up registration that was before COVID Omnicron hit. We didn't know what would happen, but it just had such an overwhelming onslaught of registrations and people wanting to be here. And in the last two days of interaction with folks, it's just been like a huge reunion after three years of kind of being in a moment away. Absolutely, a huge reunion. One that was, I just felt so normal walking into your keynote yesterday. And of course, I always look for numbers because I know you're going to have numbers. 3.3 trillion spend under management. You're almost at a trillion a year run rate. That's huge. The growth of CUPA just up into the right. It is, and it's really a thanks to our customer community. I mean, there are just incredible champions here, courageous folks that are pushing for change inside their companies. And we're honored to be the technology platform that drives a lot of that change. A more and more spend driven through the system that's been being optimized, going to the right channels, companies are saving money and it's given them more fuel to pursue their own missions and visions and everything that their companies seek to do. That's, I just had a conversation with a customer about an hour ago and he was talking about everything was paper based manual, no visibility. And I've talked to other customers and I think I've got Jable on this afternoon who had like six billion in indirect spend they couldn't see. And with CUPA, the blinders are off. And there's that visibility that the BSM community is really helping organizations, glean value, drive profitability. Talk to me about it from your perspective how the BSM community has grown to be able to deliver, as you say, value as a service. Look, what's happening is that the customers we have, we have over 2,500 customers around the world. Every one of these customers, they have their own missions, they have their own visions, they're pursuing their goals. But in order to do that, they need energy, they need gas in their tank, right? And with every dollar we save them, with every method we allow them to become more efficient in the way that they work, in the way that they have visibility, the way that they collaborate with one another, the way that they think about fulfillment of demand through supply chain design or sourcing activities, contract negotiations, procurement, sourcing, treasury, they manage that cash. It's unlocking that firepower, it's giving them more gas on the tank. And that's incredibly rewarding for me and my colleagues and everyone here because our mission is the amplification of all of their missions on a daily basis, really. Right, that amplification, that acceleration, the A and Coupa. I got to see you about a year and a half ago, we were a few months into the pandemic, but I'm just curious what some of the customer conversations are that you've had given the challenges with the supply chain that's on the lips of every politician and pretty much everybody. What are some of the things that Coupa has really helped customers to mitigate? Well, first of all, the simplest things were when everyone went home, they couldn't do those paper-based processes anymore. So they leveraged our platform much more, right? I mean, they couldn't write paper checks, for example, and go in the office and do that. And that's just a simple example. Order things or get goods and services to their folks that were now working from home, for example. But then they were also faced with the cute issue of supply chain needs and the agility of their supply chain. So we helped them figure out different ways to transport the goods and services they need, different freighting routes in real time through our AI capabilities. So I mean, those are just some of the examples, but we really think of our value proposition as almost like a Swiss army knife. And what happened during COVID is, we went out into the jungle and you didn't know which of those tools you would have needed, but we tried to be right there with our customers to give them the knife, the match, the scissors, the fishing line, whatever was needed at that point in time to help them survive and thrive. And that's really how we see ourselves as a true partner to our customers. Yeah, a true enabler. Well, I was looking at your FY22 numbers, growth in new business in excess of 60%, record annual revenues, 725, be up 34%, subscription revenue up, Cooper up and to the right. Well, it is. And what we're trying to be very thoughtful with this business, we're trying not to grow so fast that suddenly we leave our customers behind. We really try to take it one customer at a time. But the beauty of this growth, this measured and thoughtful growth is that we have an incredible renewal rate. I mean, our customers stay with us and they add more and more capabilities. And that drives an incredible cash flow situation for our business. And that makes us as Cooper very resilient. That's why we love being so transparent with our customers. Here's our growth. Here's our margins. Here's our cash flow. Here's how we're investing into R&D and innovation. Here's the M&A that we're doing to bring you a greater set of value propositions. And I love that transparency. It's one of the beauties of being a public company. Everything's out there and everyone can see in the side whether they want to be a customer, be an investor, be a colleague. It's a wonderful thing. Talk about the power of the community. Community AI launched in FY22. You showed some numbers and just the power of all of that anonymized, aggregated data to be analyzed. What is that? How has that really driven the evolution of Cooper in the last 13 years you've been at the helm? Well, we set our sights on doing this as far back as 13 years ago. I know you interviewed Donna recently. She was sharing with you that we set up our contracts with the customers in a way where we could take their anonymized, sanitized data, aggregate it, and see if we can glean insights from it. That could be used for the benefit of each individual customer. Really break the silos of traditional enterprise software where you do one deployment at a time and you live in your own little silo in your own little world. Now we're pushing a myriad of prescriptions out to each of our customers. They can see the best ways in real time to avoid supplier risk, for example. Make sure that the goods and services they buy, they get on time at the right price point. Make sure that the suppliers that they're working with support their diverse needs, their minority owned supplier needs, all of the transparency that comes with seeing trillions of dollars in data in real time and gleaning insights from it. And we're just scratching the surface in this area. We're absolutely just scratching the surface. We've pushed out this platform to our customers and now they're coming back to us and saying, wow, could I glean this insight from the community? What if we can get access to that information? And we're encoding that for them and pushing that information and those applications out to them. So this is going to be an exciting couple of months and quarters and years to take this concept of community AI to a completely different level. And I think it's not only new for Coupa, but I really see it as something completely new for the enterprise software industry where the opportunity to break silos is really upon us. It's critical, but a lot of communities are very transactional or episodic. Coupa's isn't like that. Well, you know, there's no shortcut to that that has taken 13 years. And I think that begins with the Owen Coupa, which is the openness, the openness, the transparency, the authenticity in which we engage with our customers. They understand how we work. They have access to all of our other customers. They can interface with them, interact with them within their own industry, within their own company size, whether they're the largest companies in the world or upper-mid market or mid-market customers, whether they're subscribing to our treasury applications or our supply chain or procurement applications. And by having access to this community in real time and a community that's grounded in that trust and authenticity, you know, only great things happen. Only great things happen. The trust and authenticity is critical. It's easy to say, you can trust us. We're authentic. It's a whole other thing to actually feel it and believe it and see it. And you get that sense here from your keynote. Barbara Corkin was fantastic, inspiring. I loved how she said she probably never had an original good idea herself that always gets them from others. And I thought, that's Coupa to me. That's the spirit of community, the spirit of collaboration. All of those C's. C and body. None of us is as smart as all of us. That's what it is, no doubt. It's true that power of that community is, I think I read in Fast Company just really recently that you described the community AI as a moonshot. And I thought, where is he going to go from here? Well, it's continuing to build on this concept. It's really continuing to build on this concept of breaking these silo data stores, aggregating them and distilling insights from them in ways that we ourselves as Coupa, as our R&D team or Raja and our product team, we don't know all the different ways the customers will want to use this power of community, but we know we have a very scalable underlying platform that operates in virtually every language and virtually every currency that will be there to support their evolving needs. As we continue our, you know, what we hope to be lifelong relationship with our customers. I was talking to one of your customers, I think it was Jable recently and we're having them on the program today and they actually said they were an SAP ERP shop. They could have gone the SAP route and chose Coupa and one of the main reasons was because Coupa was going to be able to evolve with them but allowed them to help Coupa evolve. And I get that sense from a lot of your customers that we have the opportunity to influence the direction that the technology goes because we're here in the back office now moving to the front in it day to day really figuring out what if it did this, what if it did that, now it does all of these things because the community gets to be that influential. That's right. And we also, the beauty is we're able to help them, our customers unlock the value of their investments into core ERP platforms, whether it be SAP or Oracle or a host of other ERPs. We help them get strategic leverage from those applications and we're building this company very much on the shoulders of early enterprise software companies like themselves. So it's really a beautiful relationship with our customers but also a way to give them more and more leverage. That's critical, especially as every company these days has to be a data company but they have to be able to see the data, glean insights, act on it, make pivots. That's one of the words that we probably will use so often in the last two years as pivot but I think without these companies having a data strategy from a competitive perspective, they're toast. I think so. I think it's really tough. You know, I framed it very simply. We spent many, many years in the industrial revolution. We were worried about, you know, physical labor moving parts. We entered into the information revolution with the internet and now I think we're really in what I would call the knowledge revolution. It's, as you said, it's not only the data but gleaning valuable insights from that massive growing data store and delivering them at the point of need so that people could take advantage of that insight and that knowledge. And we're proud to be on the forefront of that as a growing technology company, a cloud-based, what we call value as a service company. Value as a service, right. You mentioned in your keynote you were talking about the struggles of being a parent during the pandemic and trying to get your kids to watch some of the classics. I know it's right there with you. Superman, Rocky, was it Plans, Trains and Automobiles? That's right, that's right. And I thought, you mentioned, you know, my kids had about three minutes of attention span. I thought in the business world, people have three seconds. The real time, get me what I need in the point of time when I need it is critical for every business in every industry because the consumer is so, our demands are higher and higher. That's right, that's right. And you know, the you and Koopa stands for user centricity and the logic there was simply if the machine could do the majority of the work, there should be less and less stress upon the end user, the user themselves. As I say, deliver exactly what they need at the point of need to them on the screen or on their phone or wherever it is so that they could keep business moving forward as efficiently, thoughtfully, and optimally as possible. And you know, we take the responsibility as a value of service company, you know, very seriously try to make sure that we optimize the time spent of the sort of the man-machine, woman-machine interaction so that less and less is on the man or woman and much, much more is on the platform that we continue to develop. One of the things I read that you said in the press release, I think it was yesterday, is chief financial officers, chief information officers, CEOs, they need to be chief transformation officers. That's a hard thing to do, especially for, I can imagine, organizations like I had Casey's General Store on. This is a company that was founded in the 50s. How are you seeing that manifest into reality when you're talking with those CFOs and CEOs? Are they really becoming those chief transformation officers? Well, they're all aspiring to it, and we're, in my view, proudly helping them move as quickly as possible toward that end. To have companies that are highly agile, that can respond to shifting consumer demands, consumer needs, shifting supply chain challenges, shifting financial scenarios out in the marketplace, given the volatility of the stock market. So if we could offer that agility and resiliency and that additional stool of digital transformation for CEOs, CFOs and CIOs, then we're doing something special out there. So Rob, last question for you. What does tomorrow look like for Coupa? What are we going to see and feel next year? Any crystal ball insight you can share with me? You know, I don't know. One of the things about us is we're not, we're a little bit of a boring company. It's one quarter after the next week. I saw the dancing video, that is not boring. But you know, it's been what? 52 quarters going at it, one quarter of time. One customer at a time. One interaction at a time. One line of code at a time. You know, one QA assurance process at a time. One support ticket at a time. Just moving forward, moving forward, moving forward. And before you know it, you turn around, you look around. And what began as a couple of handfuls of people with a desire to inspire an industry is starting to take shape. And we feel like we're not just getting started, but we're certainly in the early innings of I think creating a very special company and more importantly, a very special community around the company that we're forming. I would say a very special community. Rob, great to have you on the program. Congrats on doing the event in person, getting all of these people that are so ready to see you guys and to be able to interact with CUPA and its partner ecosystem, getting us all together. One of my favorite events. We appreciate you stopping by on theCUBE. Thank you, thanks for having me again. All right, for Rob Bernstein, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of day two of CUPA Inspire 2022 from Las Vegas. Stick around, my next guest will join me shortly.