Subway, a fast-food franchise operation with 35,000 restaurants worldwide, expected to host a new, mission-critical financial system at its own data centers but ended up doing the opposite.
To help franchises better manage their spending, Subway turned to a system from Coupa Software, a software-as-a-service vendor that is only five years old, is funded by venture capital and hosts its software on Amazon.com’s cloud service.
“Because it was SaaS-based, we almost passed on it because we were looking for more of an internal solution,” said Carman Wenkoff, deputy CIO of Subway’s Independent Purchasing Cooperative (IPC), which negotiates purchasing for Subway franchisees and handles IT.