The wisdom of the game: SaaS Deployment Cloud Computing

As a fast-food franchise company with 35,000 stores around the world. Like many big businesses, the initial expectation was a spending management system that carried out important tasks within the enterprise, but the result was unexpected, and eventually it adopted the exact opposite pattern.

How far away the race is from the beginning is the basic fact that the Coupa software that provides software as a service (SaaS) is funded through venture capital, and software is placed on the cloud platform of Amazon's website. And with enough investment in the data center, it's possible to take over the project in-house with incremental costs.

"We have no intention of looking for SaaS based solutions at all," says Carman Wenkoff, the vice-president of the independent sourcing partner (IPC), who consults with the Pepsi franchise and the department that handles it needs. ”

The IPC decision shows that SaaS and cloud based service providers have the ability to make a place for themselves, and that the way vendors take these business models can win more enterprise-class users.

IPC began by developing a system that would help franchisees better manage their expenses. The franchise's stores in almost 100 countries now use manual processes to order food, paper products, uniforms and services from suppliers.

The cost management system of modern franchisees, part of the goal is to improve the quality of management through better forecasting franchise sales and supply and demand needs.

The IPC data center is already large enough, Wenkoff said: "In most cases, it makes sense to internalize technology, even if the technology is licensed." When you reach a specific point on the scale, incremental investment can be used to introduce another technology. ”

The company inspected such systems as electronic portals connected to the backend billing system. IPC eventually chose the Coupa San MATEO, Calif, because its approach to software design was quite good.

Wenkoff continued: "Because it's based on SaaS, we almost missed it." At first we wanted an internal solution. ”

But the idea of changing the IPC is the user interface of the Coupa software. With the same graphic features as a shopping cart, its user interface is extremely friendly. The goal is to make the operation relatively simple for different user groups.

Wenkoff went on to comment: As IPC began investing in its choices, team members began to realize the importance of a good user interface in helping to select a new system. You know, about 50% of the long-term franchises in the restaurant are not technically literate. If the company deploys a system that is difficult to operate, the operator will resist using it. The goal now is to deploy this solution within a few months and cancel all previous subscription forms.

IPC plans to extend SaaS to its restaurants in the late October. All systems in the United States and Canada will be deployed by the middle of 2012.

Chris Dwyer, analyst with Aberdeen Group, said: "Based on the cloud overhead management system is a trend that users are turning to these systems to get real-time information on the corporate budget." The advantage of Coupa is its ease of use, which attracts more users. ”

There are other deeper questions about whether the choice of SaaS is correct. Coupa using the Amazon Cloud platform is also a problem. In April, Amazon suffered a partial interruption in services that affected some customers for several days.

But Coupa's CEO Rob Bernshteyn responded: "The interruption only led to the company's 15-minute shutdown because the Coupa system was designed to switch to the unaffected parts of the Amazon cloud platform." The main responsibility is to design a set of software and architecture that can withstand failure transfer. ”

"Safety and reliability are fundamental needs that we thought would be a hindrance to our business," Wenkoff said. But none of this has happened, and the service level agreement includes provisions that minimize risk. ”

The cost of the project was not disclosed by the

Race Pepsi. But Wenkoff wrote in the written text, "You can have reason to introduce to the company and use a cheaper system." But the SaaS model brings benefits commensurate with its higher costs, such as instant generation and updates. In a global company deployment, typically the first version of a system is deployed, and will not be upgraded to a new version for some time. But in Coupa SaaS mode, ICP can update on demand. The