Subway has 35,000 restaurants across the globe and the data center capacity to internalize most technology needs, but the sandwich chain recently signed up for a spending management system hosted on Amazon.com's (NASDAQ: AMZN) cloud platform. The company chose software-as-a-service rather than an in-house deployment largely because the hosted model was so user-friendly, reports Patrick Thibodeau at Computerworld.

Subway was looking for a spending management system to provide improved sales forecasts and supply requirements so that restaurants could manage costs more efficiently. Manual processes are still in place for ordering supplies, including food, uniforms, paper goods and services.

The company initially considered in-house options. "You get to a certain point in size where the investment for us is just incremental to bring another technology in-house," said Carman Wenkoff, deputy CIO of Subway's Independent Purchasing Cooperative, which negotiates purchases for the restaurants. 

When Wenkoff's team saw the user interface on a service from start-up Coupa Software, however, they were persuaded that SaaS was the way to proceed. The interface had a consumer-like look and feel, and they knew a friendly interface would be instrumental in spurring successful adoption.

"Our intention is to make this so obvious a solution that within months of deploying it, we eliminate all other forms of ordering," Wenkoff said.

Subway's executives did harbor some of the common concerns about cloud services, including reliability, however. Coupa was one of Amazon's customers affected by the cloud provider's outage in April. But Coupa's system failed over to unaffected parts of the Amazon platform and so it only suffered 15 minutes of downtime, according to the vendor's CEO.

For more:
- see Patrick Thibodeau's article at Computerworld

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