Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry (Part 7)

Dave Terry: Our competitors were historically Concur and the big ERP players who have their own shallow apps and then some of the older generation products. While they aren’t out there actively selling, they are supporting their own customers and attempting upgrades. In that market, the older vendors are beginning to be dismissed by most of the market. IBM, even in the last summer, decided to sunset their product. They’ve formally come out with an announcement. All of those customers are rapidly making a change. We’ve been very fortunate to convert a number of very large IBM customers.

Then you have Concur and SAP Travel & Expense. SAP acquired Concur, basically sunsetting their own product. Now, they have the Concur solution. You’re left with this high top right end of the marketplace where it’s just ERP/SAP. If you’re enamored with SAP and want it to be your system for everything you do, then that’s a very attractive proposition. If you don’t want that, let’s say, then maybe it’s not so exciting and you want to see another choice.

What’s been happening over the course of the last 12 to 18 months is we’re seeing a lot of big companies go out to bid and they start with 10 to 12 vendors. Invariably though, it narrows down to two vendors – us and Concur – in every single one of these deals. We can win more than our fair share against Concur because we’ve done a very nice job on delivering on some of the advantages that you and I talked about earlier.

Our problem is Concur is still doing a fantastic job of growing because they’re in 30 other deals for every deal I’m in. I know their number of sales reps, their territories, their quotas. I’m not just not on those deals. We have a tremendous product and opportunity here. It is about continuing to grow our company on the infrastructure side to support the growing needs of demanding large global organizations, but also on the marketing side just to make sure they’re aware of us. If we can compete in more deals, I can assure you we can win a lot more and continue to grow the business dramatically.

Sramana Mitra: What has the market taught you in terms of what positioning point you typically win against Concur? When you told me about your analysis about what you thought would be the positioning point, what has the market told you?

Dave Terry: It tends to be the same. Every deal is different. Every set of customers has different sets of pain points.

Sramana Mitra: What is the primary point on which you win against Concur?

Dave Terry: It’s the usability of the application and the configurability to meet the real demanding business requirements behind the scenes. We have a unique capability to be able to deliver on that in a differentiating way.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. What else do you want to share?

Dave Terry: We started with where I was born. What else could I have missed? We were fortunate to have the growth that we’ve had in a market that we gambled on.

I should add this. We formed the company in 2007. As we developed the software, we were just going to come out with our first main three customers in late 2008. If you recall, that’s when the global economic collapse hit. Here’s Alan and I, with the world economic collapse staring us in the face. We had left substantially nice-paying careers with Thomson Reuters. We now had employees and were doing all this bootstrapped.

We’re wondering if this is the right time to make this gamble. For us, at least, since we were in the market of cost control, it became very fortunate because organizations worldwide were saying, “Under these conditions, we cannot grow our revenues like we have previously. The one way we can affect the bottom line is to control costs.” Even organizations that were spending money wildly in the days of expenses were now trying to control costs. They are putting better compliance and policies in place and standardizing those across the organizations to take advantage of an application like Chrome River. We grew right through the economic collapse really well. We were fortunate in that the global economy put the attention on cost control at that time.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. Great story. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry
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