Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about what were the circumstances of starting this new company.

Dave Terry: We had a large ERP system for these large law firms. ChromeRiver does expense reporting. We automate the labor-intensive and error-prone workflow process of expense reporting and supplier invoice management. While I was still at Elite, some of our largest customers came to us and said they wanted a robust expense reporting solution. We, just like all ERP systems, had a very shallow module for expense reporting. You could put in your expenses and it routed to someone for approval. Then, it was off for payment. This was 10 years ago.

There were a number of systems that were starting to evolve. Even with all of our robust resources, we decided to partner with another app at that time. We partnered with Extensity. Our main competitor in the ERP space for these large professional services went out and partnered with another company. In the ensuing years, each of those solutions were leapfrogged by another company called Concur. Most people have heard of Concur. Concur did a really fantastic job of building a big business. They sold to Concur just this past Fall for $8.3 billion. It’s called a lot of attention to the space. Back at that time though, we were with this other partner. Concur had been around for a while but they were still making the transition to SaaS.

Sramana Mitra: They did that as a public company, which is not easy to do.

Dave Terry: They did. It’s a very difficult move. They succeeded in getting through that. We started Chrome River. We were fortunate enough to begin as a SaaS operation from day one in 2007. What happened right before we started Chrome River was a few of our customers had also attempted to implement Concur. No disrespect to Concur, but we could see a business need because deep within these more sophisticated customers, we’re having challenges. The needs and the configurability of the system weren’t exactly being met for some of these customers.

We’re fortunate that Alan and I and some of our other key executives who had worked this difficult end of the financial systems market for 20 years knew a lot of those requirements really well. We felt we could build a new business, taking some of that expertise. That’s when we stepped out of Thomson Reuters.

Sramana Mitra: What is an example of the kind of things that Concur couldn’t do based on your observation that you thought you could do well?

Dave Terry: There were really two things. One particularly was largely focused around the user interface. In 2008, the move towards mobile was becoming more popular. The consumerization of enterprise software was becoming a growing trend where employees and organizations are really getting tired of using the large enterprise style. They wanted to use their enterprise software much like they use their common social media apps. They wanted it to be a more intuitive experience.

Number one is we felt we could do a really good job starting from the ground up in designing a massively intuitive user interface – making it easy to get their expenses in, dealing with their compliance issues in a very intuitive way. On the business side, we also realized there was a problem with the current systems on the market in that they weren’t as highly configurable. What we did was we used different technologies. We built our system on top of a business rule engine, which gave us the flexibility and capability to handle a wide variety of even unexpected configurations. We used that technology approach to meet the needs of large global organizations no matter what their requirements are in terms of policies, spend compliance, routing, visibility, and then combined that with our intuitive interface which the employees themselves like to use.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry
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