Friday 15th January, 2015

Coupa Software has announced the acquisition of Contractually, a cloud innovator based in Vancouver that helps reduce business reliance on frustrating manual processes or inadequate technology to simplify the contract process.

With this acquisition, Coupa takes the next step in transforming B2B commerce by further reducing the need for time-consuming contract authoring and signature processes. This capability will help businesses streamline the way they manage contract lifecycles and version control which will reduce human error and increase efficiency.

“Coupa’s acquisition of Contractually seems likely to disrupt the contract lifecycle management market by leveraging the power of real-time document collaboration to leapfrog legacy applications and solve age old contract authoring related problems,” said Christine Dover, research vice president of Enterprise Application and Digital Commerce at IDC. “The enterprise application market continues to grow by the day, and Coupa is expected to benefit from this growth.”

Contracts are a foundation for doing business and often the first step in securing long-lasting relationships among suppliers, partners and customers. Yet, despite how critical contracts are for business continuity and the major shifts in how business today is conducted, outdated processes are still being used to manage companies’ most important documents. For example, many contracts today are authored in one application, then emailed back and forth for review and editing, signed in yet another application, and returned via email for further human processing.

Since 2012, Coupa has had contract repository and alerting functionality embedded in its Spend Management suite. The acquisition of Contractually will help take Coupa’s capabilities to the next level by making it possible for customers to manage their contracts in Coupa from the moment a contract is created.

“Coupa started in 2006 with a clear vision of unified spend management, and we’ve followed it through with steady execution,” said David Williams, vice president of technology at Coupa. “The Contractually acquisition is another building block that will be carefully applied to our unified suite. The synergy here is very clear as we will extend our existing contract repository and alerting functionality to add contract lifecycle management that starts with a collaboration document for authoring.”

“When we created Contractually, we set out to modernize contract authoring and lifecycle processes,” said Martin Ertl, founder of Contractually. “Our team is thrilled to join Coupa and share our innovations with the global enterprise market.”

Coupa expects the additional capabilities from the Contractually technology to be made available to select customers by mid-2016.