How far can a company doing its own data analytics go toward certainty? Its work might turn up interesting insights; they might even be helpful or indicative. But will they earn the adjective — prescriptive — that’s sweet music to the ears of all data scientists?

Companies are selling plenty of software that promises to turn users’ data into applicable, profitable insights. However, the failure rate of data projects suggests that tools alone aren’t quite completing the job. What’s missing? It could be the actual data companies have on hand. So should they outsource analytics to a company with exactly the data needed to answer their specific questions?

If those questions pertain to managing business spend, they may not need look further than Coupa Software Inc. The company sources data from its whole user community to answer the questions that matter to them.

“[In enterprise software], every customer is on their own island using information technology for a certain business process,” said Rob Bernshteyn (pictured), chief executive officer and chairman of Coupa. “What we’ve done with community intelligence is we’ve aggregated, anonymized and sanitized data from the customer base and then are distilling insights that we can be prescriptive about.” 

Bernshteyn spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Coupa Inspire EMEA event in London. They discussed how Coupa culls users’ data to return useful insights and benchmarks (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Users get the gravy from outsourced data

What sort of insights can Coupa offer companies? It might help them weed out bad actors inside and outside their walls. For example, it may tip them off to a poorly rated supplier and recommend a well-liked one based on reports from its user community.

A lot of businesses lack crucial visibility into spend, according to Bernshteyn. One of the Coupa platform’s main strengths is that it removes any mystery surrounding budget, expenses and the like. “We’re identifying employees that may be expensing things or doing things that are fraudulent based on the collective intelligence of what we’re seeing around the entire world in real time,” he said.

Coupa doled out 22,000 prescriptions to customers over the last year. Its insights also help it improve its own customer service. “I think as we learn from every deployment and collect those insights, we’re going to be able to drive value faster and faster to our customers,” Bernshteyn concluded.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Coupa Inspire EMEA. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Coupa Inspire event. Neither Coupa, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE