Ruby on Rails helped startup Coupa build what is now the world’s leading commercial open source e-procurement platform. Only one year since incorporating, the company has released four versions, each with better features than the last. Can you say” rapid development”?
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Ruby on Rails helped startup Coupa build what is now the world’s leading commercial open source e-procurement platform. Only one year since incorporating, the company has released four versions, each with better features than the last. Can you say” rapid development”?
When founded in early 2006, e-procurement startup Coupa (http://www.coupa.com) faced the same challenge any new company developing software in the” Web 2.0″ world must contend with: How to build a scalable, affordable application at light speed, that’s nonetheless as easy to use as Amazon.com, all on a shoestring budget? Luckily, an answer was readily apparent — use the gem Ruby on Rails.
Before launching Coupa, I spent ten years building and growing the e-procurement software business at Oracle. Oracle builds complex and complicated software, typically suitable only for the world’s largest enterprises, and those with seemingly unlimited IT budgets.
Being a startup and given the company’s focus on mid-sized businesses, it was obvious that what worked for Oracle clearly wouldn’t work for Coupa. With Coupa, the slate was clean, and there was a chance to start from scratch to build a” lighter” purchasing and e-procurement application. Of course, with freedom comes (often too many) choices, and the team explored a number of options for its software platform, everything from the operating system, to the development language, and from the web server, to the database.
We distilled our vision for web-based e-procurement software down to the catchphrase” Easier to use than avoid.” Simultaneously, the software also had to be very affordable, setting an aggressive pricing scheme of about $15 per user per month.
Weighing the Options
A self-professed computer geek and open source enthusiast, I’d led the delivery of Oracle’s first Apache- and JServ- based applications in 1998. But I…
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