As of Thursday, one could look up a Form 8-K filing on the SEC site from May 3, 2017 that simply stated that Coupa had completed its acquisition of Trade Extensions, now called Coupa Advanced Sourcing for those of you on the ball (and watching TE profiles on LinkedIn for updates as well). SI expects you’ll see a formal press release early this week.
While SI completed its initial analysis shortly after announcement, it’s going to hold off publishing until after Coupa Inspire to see if Coupa inspiration changes the doctor‘s mind at Inspire. 🙂 # Look for a deep analysis the week of the 22nd.
(For speculators, you can check out SI’s historical writings on M&A in general and its posts on the importance of cultural conformity in partnerships and then balance these views with the simple fact that only one* acquisition of an optimization platform provider has succeeded in the Sourcing/Procurement space to date, and probably take a guess as to the doctor‘s current view. But it would be only a guess.)
*Tigris was swallowed by VerticalNet; CombineNet shrivelled in SciQuest, now Jaggaer; Mindflow was killed by Emptoris (which was in turn butchered by IBM, whose initial foray into optimization was so bad that they ended up giving it all away for free in COIN-OR) and the founders of Algorhythm subsumed their optimization capabilities into their rapid application development platform Applifire! Only the VerticalNet acquisition by BravoSolution was a success, and likely only because the BravoSolution model required keeping VerticalNet more-or-less in-tact as the US operation of the global BravoSolution organization (as there was essentially no US presence at the time).
#Or at least lets him focus in on one analysis in particular (as his analysis is actually a bifurcated analysis that depends on decisions and directions taken over the next year … will make for a very long blog series as is … )