BackClick Moment | 'You either create a wave or ride a wave to succeed'
We knew that to be successful, you either had to create a wave or ride a wave
PremiumIcertis has had a number of “click" moments in our journey to become the first contract lifecycle management (CLM) firm valued at more than $1 billion. By the time Monish and I came together to create Icertis in 2009, we had already led a couple of successful star ups. We knew that to be successful, you either had to create a wave or ride a wave. Cloud computing was just starting to emerge and we recognized right away that it was going to be a huge wave. That was our first “click".
We decided to build enterprise resource planning (ERP) apps based in the cloud. We started by developing a flexible platform that will allow us to build various types of applications on top of it. In the early days, we built many different apps that tied into the ERP system. The platform architecture and the fact that it was “built in the cloud" would become critical differentiators when we pivoted to CLM. We also realized that contract management had existed as a category for a long time before we came around but it wasn’t until we were talking with my former colleagues at Microsoft that we uncovered the need for a new way to manage contracts. That was our second “click".
Microsoft was looking for a way to manage the huge volume of information exchange agreements they were signing with their more than 115,000 employees, 650,000 partners, and numerous customers. With operations across 100 countries, there was no centralized storage. Existing storage solutions were hard to search for and the process of requesting and completing agreements was lengthy and time-consuming. Microsoft asked us to develop a solution for them. We knew our cloud-based platform could enable a greater deal of self-service contracting and provide a single repository for agreements that could be easily searched. We were able to reduce contract administration costs by 40% and improve speed of contracting by 60%. Shortly after that, we pivoted the company to exclusively address enterprise contract management and began building a solution to address the complex needs of Fortune 2000 companies.
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