Icertis platform integrates with business and productivity applications: Curt Anderson

Icertis is a software company, providing contract management software to the enterprise businesses. Headquartered in Bellevue, Washington with 12 offices globally, it has an engineering office in Pune, India, offices in Singapore and Sydney, and 3 support centers.

Curt Anderson, Chief Financial Officer, Icertis, tells us more about the recent developments. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: How are you providing cloud-based enterprise contract management?

Curt Anderson: The Icertis platform enables teams across a company to intelligently work with contracts which form the core of any business. The Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI) platform is designed to transform a contract from a static document to strategic advantage.

The ICI platform can be configured to work on any kind of contract: buy-side, sell-side, employment, lease, NDA, whatever a business requires. Our interface is entirely configurable and can be adapted and integrated to make any business process smarter and more effective

The platform seamlessly integrates with leading business and productivity applications like Microsoft Dynamics Oracle, Salesforce, SAP Ariba, and all major sourcing, procurement, PLM, project management, and CPQ solutions. Smart and contextual information about each contract helps companies track performance, manage risk and obligations.

The platform also provides customizable alerts and notifications to help avoid penalties and take advantage of potential rebates or incentives.

The Contract Intelligence platform can be applied organization-wide to have an immediate and significant effect on the bottom line, reducing speed to contract while maximizing profits.

DQ: Elaborate on the success in the times of Covid-19.

Curt Anderson: The market demand for contract intelligence helped Icertis acquire and retain clients across the automotive, BFSI, consumer products, distribution, healthcare, manufacturing, IT and professional services, pharmaceuticals, and Retail sectors.

With over 7.5 million contracts having a total contracted value of over $1 trillion, we count leading companies like Adobe, Airbus, BASF, Cognizant, Daimler, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, and Sanofi on our roster and recently announced Auth0, Best Buy, Humana, Porsche and Regeneron as customers.

Our strong growth was similarly supported with robust hiring in the first half of 2020. The company added over 300 employees globally. To meet the increased demand, Icertis hired a total of 319 employees in the past six months including more than 50 recent graduates from the class of 2020.

With more than 1,300 employees across 12 locations around the world, the company expects to create and fill more than 200 new jobs by the end of 2020.  

Icertis’ continued growth speaks to significant market opportunity and demand for contract lifecycle management (CLM) generally and the Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI) platform specifically.

DQ: How do you see the changing conditions impact the enterprise? How has that impacted you?

Curt Anderson: India's software-as-a-service (SaaS) market has multiple start-ups that have hit the $1 billion valuation. These unicorns have grown at 30% CAGR to become a $3.5 billion revenue market as of FY20. This growth is around 1.5 times faster than the global SaaS market, according to a NASSCOM report.

The Covid-19 pandemic and resulting economic turmoil have highlighted the importance of having an organization-wide solution that turns contracts from static documents to strategic advantage. Companies are increasingly looking towards solutions that adjust to changing customer demand, build more agile supply chains, and protect against increased risk.

DQ: Why should CFOs rely on contract lifecycle management?

Curt Anderson: CFOs should increasingly adopt contract lifecycle management because -

* It helps CFOs manage cash flow and identify and mitigate risk organization-wide.  An integrated contract management system can drive faster time to revenue, help to optimize expenses and manage risk – ultimately improve cash flow with less risk

* CLM aids in negotiation of contracts with better business outcomes and lower risk

* Contracts are connected to each piece of a company’s business, so CLM helps the CFO understand the big picture at his/her company

Many CFOs have a strong understanding of the requirements of their company but are unable to respond quickly as their contracts aren’t easily available for review.  And since contracting takes place in a variety of functions and locations throughout an organization, the CFO isn’t always involved in managing the contract details.

At times, these contracts may be on a hard drive or sometimes they might be completely inaccessible. This hinders a CFOs ability to react quickly to a crisis. Any contract which is non-digitized amounts to an invisible contract.

By having a modern Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) platform, CFOs can respond quickly and improve business outcomes, all the while retaining more control. The CFO can access information from all of the company’s contracts quickly and seamlessly giving them a competitive advantage.

CLM platforms are increasingly relying on AI and ML to process massive volumes of complex contracts. Information mined from these contracts is then integrated into business systems. The increasing use of AI and ML in CLM has helped ensure that CLM is not a luxury but a necessity, which every CFO must have at his/her disposal.

Cognizant is a great example of how CLM benefitted a company which was facing business uncertainty due to Covid-19. Since Cognizant had the vast majority of its customer contracts digitized and managed in a CLM system, its risk managers were able to quickly check clauses pertaining to work-from-home restrictions, security requirements for remote work, and provisions for cases where delivery delays were inevitable.

By looking to its contracts, Cognizant was able to confidently chart a path through the crisis and continue to deliver business value for its clients.

DQ: What are the pitfalls ahead, and how prepared are you?

Curt Anderson: Icertis is fortunate we were able to quickly shift to being fully remote and maintain business with limited disruptions. No one knows what is coming next, so it is imperative to remain agile – especially in such fast-moving business environments.

We saw the initial impact of COVID-19 hit and it hit some companies very hard. It is important, that if they aren’t already, businesses are prepared to maintain operations and continuity if a crisis comes up. We are prepared to help our customers however we can during this trying time.

As the pandemic spread, we had to prepare the business and workforce for a sudden remote working scenario. We have more than 1,300 people globally and out of these, more than 400 are engineers with high network bandwidth requirements. To our benefit, we had a disaster recovery plan in place for our business. Our investments in building a strong employee-centric workplace made the transition to virtual work easy for us.

DQ: Why should organisations be capitalizing on post-Covid-19 movement to digitalization?

Curt Anderson: The pandemic made companies realize the importance of having a secure CLM solution they trust to come through for them in the time of a crisis.

Contract management went quickly from a nice to have to a need to have, with companies who already had it in place having a much more seamless transition to work from home with less business disruptions.  

The Covid-19 pandemic will accelerate the agility and digital transformation speed of many companies. This is necessary to stay competitive and to continue to engage with customers.

As Companies increasingly adapt to a new normal where proactive social distancing, remote working and buying behaviours have become part of our culture, only those companies that moved with speed and adopted robust digital practices across the organization will reap the largest benefits.

Companies that possess strong technical infrastructure and robust end-to-end digital processes (paper-less) are seeing higher productivity before and through this pandemic.  These digital leaders have been more resilient in responding to the COVID-19 challenge and will emerge as stronger leaders as recovery begins.