 From London, England, it's theCUBE. Covering Coupa Inspire 19, EMEA, brought to you by Coupa. Welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin on the ground in London, a Coupa Inspire 19, and I'm really excited to be joined by my last guest of the day, save the best for last. We have Rajah Hamoon, the EVP of products from Coupa. Rajah, welcome back to the program. Thank you for having me, thanks for coming here. Of course, it's been great, we've had a great day. Lots of buzz and excitement in the expo hall. The lights are dimmed, it's happy hour. So thank you. Perfect time for theCUBE during happy hour. So I know your keynote is tomorrow, so we'll get to that since we won't be able to cover that. But talk to me about some of the new product innovations that Coupa announced today. This last time we spoke at Inspire Las Vegas was only a few months ago, so what's new? Wow, a lot is new. It's hard to believe it's only been three months since then, it's been so fast. We very much continue our focus on our community-powered capabilities. This has been an incredible focus for us. So most recently, we've added to all of the announcements we talked about at Vegas, the next waves of source together, the opportunity to bring our community to come and source using their collective spent power. Lots of new enhancements in that area. And also, we're taking our supplier insights to the next level. One of the exciting capabilities our customers loved is that being part of a community member, I can come in and I can look at insights across all of my suppliers from the entire community. What we've been working with them on is constantly adding more and more information to that. So now we have diversity data. So you can come in and you can search for suppliers that meet your... Like women or businesses? Exactly, exactly. Those are increasingly becoming more and more important. And then we can help companies source with the right suppliers much more easily right off the bat. Other areas that we've announced today was Cooper Pay for Expenses in Early Access Program. We also announced Invoicing going on GA when we talked in Vegas. It was still in the Early Access Program capabilities. And opening up our platform, Cooper as a platform. Tell me about that, because I wasn't quite clear when Rob was talking about it this morning. I thought I want to dig in that with you. Cooper as a platform, what is that? What does it look like? So what's exciting about this is so from our inception as a company, we were always had this all in Cooper about being open for the entire ecosystem that our customers might have. Our vision has always been, we want to be ultimately the business screen for everything business spend management related for our customers. So over the years, we kept taking the level of openness with our partners through different levels, if you say, if you will. For example, we started with just integrations in the beginning and we certified these integrations with Cooper Link. We've taken it most recently where we allow partners to embed their mini apps within Cooper. So for example, you can see one of our partners, EcoVaris, now they have the capability to embed their supplier diversity data, sustainability data, right on the supplier record. And what's beautiful about this is that our customers, when they look at it, it looks at one beautiful unified experience and bringing all the data in context for what they want. Today this morning, Rob shared one example from Amadeus for trip integrations. So right on the homepage, I can see, right within Cooper, I can see all their bookings that I've done with the travel provider, my pre-approvals, expense reports, all within one unified experience. But ultimately what we want to take Cooper as a platform is to become this app directory that third party partners and platform developers start building applications to extend Cooper to bring more choice and value to our customers. Okay, wow. Is that one of the things I saw Rob share this morning was integration with Slack? Yes. So business folks can review, approve or reject, like expenses for example, right from within Slack without even having to go into the platform. Yes, yes, you hit on a very important concept, which we call the best UI is no UI in many ways. And the idea there is we always put ourselves in the user's shoes and ask ourselves, how do we get them what they need with the least friction? In some cases that might involve a user experience because you need to ask them a questions. In many cases we can automate the whole thing, so we just do it. And in many cases it means we go to them to where they are, such as in Slack. I'm going to ask you to leave Slack or somewhere else. Right then and there, you should be able to approve or reject why you have to go anywhere else. Is that what Cooper means by no UI is the best UI? Correct, best UI is no UI. So ultimately wherever there is effort, we want to involve people only when they need to add value, that's it. And as much as we're able to automate, that's great. So we take that off of their table. And we also adjust to the type of experience they need. Sometimes just a text message is enough. Sometimes bring the data to me into a collaboration application that I want. Sometimes we help them approve right from a button. You don't even go into Cooper in order to do that. So we're always thinking of how we drive adoption, and it's important concept, not just on the employee side of companies. It's even more so on the supplier side as well. Tell me how. When you think of any large organizations, they have tens of thousands of thousands of suppliers. Many have hundreds of thousands of suppliers. And the supplier ecosystem is everything from very small contractor, mom and pop, shop, maybe two people or even one person all the way to very, very large companies. So as you look at that whole spectrum, you have to really think what does every audience need? And so in many cases, these people, they may need to do everything very quickly, straight from an email without having to remember a user ID and a password to log into something. So it eliminates friction at every step of the process for them. Wow, so let's talk about the community insights. We look at some of the data that Cooper has gotten from finance leaders in the UK that was a survey that you guys did recently of 253 decision makers in finance and some of the numbers were glaring like, wow, 96% of these decision makers said, we don't have complete visibility of all of our spend. And then I was talking to a customer today who said, we've got now got 95% of all of our business spend going through Coupa and that was within less than a year. So the opportunity there to deliver that visibility and the insights back to the community is poked. It's incredibly exciting, it's incredibly exciting. We're starting to see more and more, the sentiment is definitely loud and clear and by working constantly on the A, the accelerated in Coupa we work on getting more and more of the spend for each and every customer, under management. When we start projects for customers right off the bat we use our AI classification tools before they even start with Coupa where we start helping them get visibility onto all of their existing spend so that as they start into their Coupa journey they are always looking at it holistically. So we normalize all of that data and provide them insights and reports right off the bat as well. Tell me about the customer interactions that you have as the EVP of products, lot of customers on the platform, a lot of data there, how are customers influential in the direction? Like for example, you know obviously I won't give a secret sauce, but for Coupa Inspire 2020 what are some of the things that we might see customers influencing in terms of your roadmap, the direction, partnerships? Yes, yes, in general the way we've always worked at Coupa with our customers and we call them like our community members really is a very incredibly tight partnership. We have three releases a year, January, May and September each of them packed with roughly about anywhere 70 to 90 new features and capabilities and all of these capabilities are touched either conceived by customers with customers or touched by customers in the form of working with them on early access programs, validation and all of that. And for me, one of my most favorite things I get to enjoy about working in SaaS and being at Coupa is that as soon as you are rolling out these capabilities and turning them on in the cloud, customers are using them. So even though like for example, right now my entire team has just finished the walkthroughs of all our May release for Inspire and when we come back from this trip we will start the design and definition. Often we might hear of new requirements that might come up and because we are in SaaS we're able to hear, adjust what it makes sense and actually be incredibly responsive to what we see. How do you do that? How do you look through all the different responses and correlate that data and determine what makes sense to stack rank in terms of priorities for new features and new capabilities? So it's definitely an art and a science for sure but there's a framework that we follow since the beginning and we continue to follow and continues to serve us really well which is always balancing between three drivers of customers' market and innovation. So the customer one is the obvious one of course where in many events like this and one-on-ones and online community we're talking to customers and they're specifically coming and asking for help in areas. Now we may not build the feature exactly as they asked but we listen to the pain beneath it and using the latest technologies we think of what is the best approach to solve the real pain that they have. So that's one part of the planning for every release cycle. The other is overall market. So for example, as we grow into more regions, newer areas, new spend categories, new adjacent powered applications that our customers are needing, we start expanding in that area as well. For example, we're right now in London. When I joined COPA back in 2012, we were just starting the entry into the EMEA market and a lot of the product capabilities were market-driven in the sense we were spending a lot of time on compliance and different regulations and all of that. And the third is innovation in what is always one of the things as we bring people on board at COPA and talk about the framework. Innovation for us is what we call pragmatic innovation and it comes from deep understanding what are the customer problems? What are the market problems? And then we ask ourselves using everything, the latest technologies, what is the best way? So you'll never hear us talk about AI for AI sake and blockchain and all of that. We're always talking about do we deeply understand the problem and what is the most appropriate? So we call them CMI, customer market innovation. Within my products organization, every product managers usually has a vision for their product and they have a four release roadmap. And in each four release roadmap, they are listing things as CMI. In many cases, the same capability is C and M and I. So it becomes an art and a science of balancing those types of things. But ultimately, when we look at a collective release of CMI, we're asking ourselves, how much does this release accelerate the success goals of our customers? Generally that's the framework that we use. Yeah, that's fantastic. Thank you for explaining that. In terms of acceleration, some of the numbers that Rob shared this morning were, I think your customers are collectively approving invoices 30% faster than last year. I said mid-sized market customers are going live on Koopa in about four months. And large enterprises in about eight months. And I've talked to a number of customers today about the speed of which they're able to get onto the platform and actually start seeing business value. So that A, for Koopa for acceleration, was well dissected today. Yes, yes, it's definitely, these are the vision areas that Rob talked about today. And in each of these vision areas, we're always asking ourselves, how do we continue to accelerate? So that's actually how one of the ideas was born around the turquoise and the hair. Which is, we want to accelerate cycle times, cycle times, and what are the different ways we can do this? Can we borrow from our consumer lives to do this? And that's where the gamification came. And sure enough, it was one of those things that got people super excited and they're putting more attention into it. Well, the consumer side of our lives is, we're so demanding, because we can get anything that we want. We can buy products and services. We can pay bills with a click or swipe. And so the B2C side, from a payments perspective, has innovated far more rapidly than the B2B side has. Correct, correct. A lot more challenge there on the B2B side. But as consumers, we want a simple experience. One of the customers I spoke to today said, when he was looking for technology, he said, I want something that looks like Amazon Marketplace, because from an adoption perspective, my teams will understand it. So that, the consumerization always interests me because we are those pretty much 12 plus hours a day. And to see how software companies like Koopa are taking and meeting the needs of those customers, obviously it's not an overnight process, gets people excited. It gets, it absolutely is. You're right, it always fascinated me also how I've seen so many companies, people almost have two personalities. Like they go into their personal lives, they have a personality, they go into their professional lives and like, oh, it's okay, it's like backend system, this and this and this. But increasingly the new generation is no longer tolerating and the drive is starting to find a shift and happen. So I think if I can have this in my personal life then, I need to be able to transact. This is the same way, why does it take 45 days? It shouldn't take 45 days. So last question for you, your keynote is tomorrow. What are some of the strategic visionary elements that you're going to leave the audience with? So I'm going to leave the audience with the key pillars of our strategy. Latest innovations we've done towards them and where we are taking them in the years ahead. One of the things I've always done over the years at Inspire is we always share a preview of what the community has been talking to us about and we're working with. And usually at the end of it, a lot of new community members might come in and ask to participate in some of the development because it means a lot to them for their own business. And then usually by the following Inspire, we start showing these things actually live and executed on. So the three strategic pillars I'll be sharing and talking about are all around the pipe that Rob talked about. How do I capture more and more spend under management? So we'll be talking about the consumerizing experiences, using voice use in KUPA, using visual recognition in KUPA. We'll be talking about new concepts around travel, around group cards, group line, all of it around the theme, focus on the end users and delight them, blow them away with consumer experiences. And then now that we do all of that, we can jump into the power users because we are increasing that spend under management. The theme by far is all around sweet synergy. Sweet synergy? Sweet synergy. This doesn't exist in the market. The market overall was all siloed applications. We're creating a new category and we've created these beautiful, elegant flows for our customers today, but there's also a wonderful long journey ahead in what we are taking it. Well, maybe we'll get to talk about sweet synergy at Inspire 2020. Absolutely. I would love to have you again. Excellent. Thank you for joining me on the program this afternoon. Best of luck on your keynote tomorrow and we'll see you the next Inspire. Thank you. My pleasure. Thanks. For Raja Hamoud, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from KUPA Inspire 19 from London. Bye for now.