Rob Devereaux

As COO, he runs the part of a software company that rarely makes it into blog posts: staffing, delivery schedules, client contracts, and the money side of every engagement. That is also where Mercury's published numbers come from. The pricing ranges, deal counts, and buyer data in the firm's research sit in records his teams keep, and when an article quotes what a project actually cost, that figure crosses his desk first.

Before Mercury, Rob put in a decade on the finance side: operating budget manager for the City of Cleveland from 2000 to 2006, a year as a senior financial analyst at Saint Louis University, then three years as a financial consultant at WellPoint, the insurer now called Elevance Health. He started out in Ohio public budgets and still works from Ohio today.

On the Mercury blog, Rob writes about the commercial side of custom software: how development gets priced, what real contracts look like, how buyers compare vendors, who owns the code, and where projects lose money.