Next Generation ERP - with Sandeep Chopra, Co-founder and Co-CEO at Everest Systems

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of BenchMarket, and your host of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Sandeep Chopra, the co-founder and co-CEO at Everest ERP. Today, we'll be covering three primary topics for Sandeep. One, the catalyst for founding Everest ERP. Second, the future of financial management platforms. And third, lessons learned from building a product for the Office of Finance. Sandeep, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming my guest here on the Metrics Measure Up podcast.

**Sandeep Chopra** (1:13)
Well, thank you for having me, Ray. It's great to be here. You know, my journey is a diverse one. I started my career in management consulting on the technology consulting side in security and privacy at a new practice area, Deloitte, back in the post-Sarbane's era, so 2006 or so. And I moved on from management consulting into application infrastructure, security products, dealing with governance, compliance, risk issues, really where the business process matters in understanding the data, and moved on to a company called Viva Systems, which was pioneering the idea of the industry cloud and then led their quality manufacturing applications product area before starting Everest.

**Ray Rike** (1:54)
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**Sandeep Chopra** (2:52)
Absolutely. Started in pharmaceutical CRM on top of the Salesforce platform. But ultimately, what made Viva the company that it is, is end up building its own platform and a set of applications for the R&D side and manufacturing side of the life sciences industry.

**Ray Rike** (3:08)
So I have to ask, how does that background and set of experiences lead to founding a next generation ERP company?

**Sandeep Chopra** (3:17)
Well, there is a common thread across all these things. You know, I think when I started my career at Deloitte, even though we were doing consulting and security and privacy, what we were really selling was understanding of the business process of various industries to be able to understand the value and the risk of the data itself. And moving on to Viva, I think what made Viva special was not just the software, it was the software, the services, and the data all working together to solve deep industry problems. So when we looked at the ERP market, one of the things my co-founders were ex-SAP and I observed was the market and ERP had become so fragmented and so customized that it really moved away from understanding the deep problems of the industries the ERP was meant to solve problems for. And that's what we sought out to reinvent.

**Ray Rike** (4:06)
Let me ask, I mean, you look at this ERP category, and of course you got the big guys, the legacy guys, SAP, Oracle, you got Workday, who brought that to the cloud from PeopleSoft. Then you have the mid-market companies, more financial management platforms than considered pure ERP, but NetSuite and Sage. You got QuickBooks and the SMB. Could you pick any more of a crowded marketplace and category, Sandeep?

**Sandeep Chopra** (4:33)
You know, it's a great point, Ray. It is an incredibly crowded category, but there's also a ton of customer pain, right? If you look at ERP, it hasn't really, the core market has not really been reinvented even in the cloud era. Sure, things have moved to the cloud. The deployment cycles have become easier. But the ultimate value of an ERP system is to help run your business processes better. And that fundamentally hasn't changed in 30 plus years. You know, it's NetSuite in the mid-market, primarily in the US and still SAP in the enterprise tier. So what we're looking to do is apply the latest technology in cloud and in AI, but apply it to re-building the core business processes from the ground up, starting with the SaaS software industry.