Contract Management Software

Today’s interview is with Ashif Mawji, CEO of Upside Software, a leading provider of contract management software.

Upside Software has a particularly impressive sales force because it operates in an incredibly challenging environment, selling to highly conservative customers who are lawyers, and facing very long sales cycles. Could you give us some examples of how Upside Software overcomes this challenge (e.g., return on investment analysis, business case examples, demonstrated productivity improvements)?

We use all of the above techniques. Upside Software typically sells into the general counsel’s office. We find that potential customers become particularly excited when Upside Software shows how use of templates can encourage internal compliance, and can demonstrate what clauses are used the most as well as which ones are red-lined heavily so they can best define their negotiating strategy. As a result, a customer’s return on investment reduces the outside counsel bill.

Can you share with us any exciting projects that Upside Software has in development? Building on UpsideRFX, will there be anything on the vendor side to accelerate sales?

We are focusing on this project in response to customer demand. I would also like to point out that Upside RFX is extremely easy to deploy with true integration because it comes with every purchase and is only turned on when licensed. We have also just launched UpsideLive, which will be a major entry into the software as a service (SaaS) market with pricing as low as $150/month for up to 3 users.

Who are your biggest competitors and what does Upside Software offer that is uniquely special in the marketplace?

Emptoris and Ariba are two of our major competitors. To our knowledge, we are the only privately held contract management software provider that is profitable, and have been so since our second year in 2001. Our breadth of functionality stands out, particularly in response to customer demands. We just finished our 2009 fiscal year in May and logged a revenue growth of over 25% and also a profit growth of almost 100%.

What would you like to say to potential customers as to Upside Software’s long term take on where software supporting the contract process will be going in the future and why becoming a user of this software is essential for business?

Organizations are under demand to do more with less. Without automating the contracting process, a company is “behind the eight ball” from a competitive standpoint. Upside Software spends a large amount of money on research and development, resulting in products that provide a return on investment in less than six months (based on published case studies). One of our customers, BNSF Railway, obtained a full return on investment in sixty-two days and went from fourteen to three employees in their contract management department.

How do you see the competitive challenge of ERP providers like SAP who have entered the contract management game? Given that it’s hard for a software company to be the best at a new application, do you think customers will accept lower functionality in return for the ease of dealing with their existing dominant enterprise software vendor, or will proper integration planning by providers like Upside Software ameliorate this issue?

Customers are finding a huge gap, with ERP providers typically only providing 10-15% of the functionality desired to obtain a full return on investment. Without this return, the value of dealing with an existing provider is reduced. We have a large number of customers that use one of the major ERP software vendors (e.g. SAP, Oracle, etc.) and as recently as two weeks back, these large customers continue to select us over the ERP vendor, due to the rich functionality we provide. Ultimately, the customer wants to get to a higher level of contracting excellence and is not just looking for a repository, so a best-of-breed solution like UpsideContract is required for that.

Could you tell us about Upside Software’s History?

The idea came to me in 1998, when I was running a systems integration company and was having trouble managing contracts, but couldn’t find any software to buy that would solve my problem. I met with a wide variety of companies who felt the same way. For that reason, we decided to start Upside Software. We quickly engaged BNSF and HP as early customers, which was a great help to our business. Today we have three hundred customers, and about one hundred team members.

Thank you, Ashif.

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