Ivory Consulting
About Ivory
Company History
Ours is one of those great high-tech start-up stories, where somebody has an idea, burns the midnight oil to make it real, gains success, and then is crushed under the heavy wheels of industry as their success spirals out of control – well, except for that last part. Instead, we’ve stayed the right size for what we do, and plan on being here for a long time to come.
In the early 1980’s, when lumbering mainframes ruled the earth, Chris Ivory had this great idea: what if you put the kind of sophisticated pricing models he’d been writing for those mainframes onto one of these new-fangled Personal Computers? Then, anybody could generate fancy equipment pricing, not just a few people at corporate headquarters.
Chris led the way in PC-based equipment finance pricing, releasing his TRUMP program in 1983, followed by SuperTRUMP a couple years later. The big breakthrough came when certain giant equipment finance companies decided it would be cool to put SuperTRUMP on the laptops of their sales pros all over the place, and then had to work out how to manage all those users – Ivory grew in response to our customers’ needs, and its product family grew to include Servers, Deployment Manager, and Portfolio tools. We also added services to help our clients integrate SuperTRUMP into their businesses.
Along the way, Chris hired a bunch of really smart people, starting with hiring Steve Hays-Lohrey to help him build SuperTRUMP for Windows. Chris set the policy, followed religiously to this day, of having people who understand the industry and Ivory’s products available by phone to answer customer question. Wild, huh? Call Ivory, and talk to somebody who actually understands what you do for a living.
Today, Ivory stands, Colossus-like, astride the equipment finance industry. Well, that may be bit strong – let’s just say that many billions of dollars in deals priced with our products get booked every year by the world’s leading finance companies.
Or, as we like to say: Not all equipment finance companies use SuperTRUMP – just the highly profitable ones!
