Two significant things have been happening over the past few years that have fundamentally changed how organizations operate. The Great Recession and the emergence of Cloud based solutions. The Great Recession taught organizations to look at their overall business and really tighten their belts wherever they can, to ensure that every dollar is being used wisely. Part of that ties in perfectly with how Cloud technology allows organizations to quickly deploy solutions to immediately tackle pain points such as: marketing automation, spend management, and human capital management. The emergence of cloud providers during a recession is a true testament to the value that cloud solutions offer organizations of all sizes. This article helps articulate how cloud solutions help organizations “Spend Smarter and Save Money.”

Over the past few years, as organizations try to protect margins, they would slash employee expenses, i.e.: payroll, travel, bonuses, etc. But, there is only so much you can cut from your employee base, organizations had to take a hard look at where else they could cut costs. So what did companies do? They decided that they needed to spend smarter and save money. For most organizations, spending money is not a problem and it really boils down into two different areas: purchasing and travel & expense spend. The challenge is ensuring that all their employees are using pre-negotiated pricing for goods and services and also being frugal when it comes to spending the companies money. It’s easy to negotiate a price discount with a supplier; the hard part is ensuring that your employees are actually buying goods and services against that pricing. It’s easy to tell an employee to take a shuttle instead of taxi; the hard part is enforcing it. This is where Cloud solutions can help.

The Cloud is a way for technology companies to deliver best in class, highly innovative solutions to customers without having to deal with the heavy infrastructure costs that traditional SaaS or on-premise technology companies have traditionally dealt with. Here at Coupa, we have been able to deploy thousands of users from hundreds of organizations at a fraction of the cost of what we would have had to have done even five years ago. This translates to solutions that deliver more value at lower costs than ever seen before in the enterprise space to organizations of all sizes. It’s really the democrization of value-add enterprise solutions to organizations of all sizes.

The Great Recession hastened how quickly Cloud solutions have been adopted into the enterprise. Organizations will no longer pay, nor afford, multi-million dollar enterprise software implementations – those days are over! Fortune 100 companies to small startups, now want to invest in solutions that deliver quick value, high ROI, and low TCO’s.
The emergence of these two changes in the world of business has created a new space: Cloud Spend Management!

Though companies’ have achieved tangible results from automating their physical supply chain processes, organizations’ financial operations rarely realize comparable benefits from such investments. This is particularly true of purchasing and spend management processes. Organizations, today in 2011, still have manual, non-integrated and very inefficient processes for helping employees buy what they need to do their job at pre-negotiated prices by the company. Imagine, how much more efficient your organization would be if your employees could create purchase orders and expense reports with as little training as it requires to use Amazon.com or Facebook? That’s where you have an explosive marriage of Spend Management and the Cloud! Exactly what organizations are looking for as we are coming out of the Great Recession – the ability to reduce costs and reap savings upwards of 10 percent of total spend. It’s a lot harder to grow revenue by $1 then it is to reduce costs by $1, given the cost of sales, development etc., to even generate $1 in revenue.