Enhancing visibility into employee trips

DuploCloud offers an all-in-one DevSecOps platform that automates infrastructure provisioning for growing startups, mid-market organizations, SMBs, and increases efficiency for platform engineering teams of all sizes. 

In DuploCloud’s early days, travelers booked all of their trips on external sites like Google Flights, Expedia, and Orbitz. Ian Hutchinson, VP of Sales at DuploCloud, recalls the difficulty he experienced managing travel for the company. “In our early days, I distinctly remember that someone booked travel across the country without asking,” said Hutchinson. “We didn’t have any visibility into whether their trip was approved business travel or not.”

Hutchinson needed a solution to establish and enforce DuploCloud’s policies for their new travel program. He immediately benefited from real time booking notifications, approval policies, and traveler booking data once Spotnana was deployed.

“I appreciate having greater visibility into when different teams book their travel,” said Hutchinson. “I see that some teams may book travel 42 days in advance, while others may book 14 days in advance. I can then directly reinforce and quantify why we should be booking as early as possible to take advantage of the lowest possible fares.”

Transparency improved around what travelers were booking and for what purpose, when it became a mandate that all travel should be booked through Spotnana. Policy compliance improved as well. “Spotnana is where the real policy enforcement happens,” said Hutchinson.

A simple user experience that promotes clarity 

A key benefit of Spotnana’s easy-to-use desktop and mobile app experience, according to Hutchinson, is that it does not require extra user training sessions. This empowers travelers and managers at DuploCloud to save time and focus on their day-to-day responsibilities. “Of all of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) products that we use, Spotnana has the cleanest user interface,” said Hutchinson. “Our users never get lost in Spotnana, and I never get questions. It’s very intuitive.”

Hutchinson values Spotnana’s straightforward booking process and compatibility with DuploCloud’s expense management tools.

“When I book a flight for myself, it’s only two or three clicks,” said Hutchinson. “I get the email confirmation, and it funnels straight into Ramp, our expense management solution, with all the trip details.”

As VP of Sales, Hutchinson uses Spotnana to organize customer-facing events that communicate DuploCloud’s vision for making DevOps and Infrastructure-as-Code accessible to everyone. 

“The Sales organization that I lead does about 20 customer-facing events per year,” said Hutchinson. “Spotnana helps us coordinate these events and have folks from Marketing and Engineering attend as well.”

Supporting in-person meetings and experiences

DuploCloud lets employees work from anywhere, but encourages each employee to connect with their team in person whenever possible.

“We miss each other, and we love to see each other,” said Hutchinson. “Thanks to Spotnana, it’s easy for our employees to hop on a plane, come visit, and meet with their teams.”

Spotnana’s global inventory enables travelers to see all available options for domestic and international carriers at the lowest possible price. Now that DuploCloud has access to a broader selection of travel content, Hutchinson plans to host additional global company offsites each year. “Every six months, DuploCloud has company offsites in India and in the United States,” said Hutchinson. “All travel is booked through Spotnana, and we are also talking about organizing team/company offsites every quarter.”

“Spotnana is solving a tough problem providing a consumer grade travel experience for business travel” said Hutchinson. 

“Given how Spotnana has supported our travel program at DuploCloud, it’s easy for me to recommend Spotnana to other companies.”