PhillyDeals: Ariba alum becomes president of insurance policy software firm

Paul Melchiorre is one of those smart South Philly kids who moved uptown - "from 20th and McKean, to 20th and Delancey," near Rittenhouse Square.

And beyond. Melchiorre was one of business-software giant SAP America's first hires when the German-headquartered company picked suburban Philadelphia for its home in the early 1990s. He headed sales. He left in 1998 to join Ariba, the networking-software company with a blue-chip client list, which was bought by SAP for $4.5 billion Monday.

"It's a great full circle. But I didn't want to go back to a 65,000-person company," says Melchiorre, a St. John Neumann High and Villanova graduate who holds a Drexel MBA.

Instead, as of Tuesday, Melchiorre is reverse-commuting by train to Exton for his new job as president of iPipeline, the fast-growing, profitable firm whose software is used by Mutual of Omaha, Radnor-based Lincoln Financial Corp. and more than 1,000 other firms when you apply for insurance policies.

"It's transforming the way people buy and sell insurance," one of the last big businesses to go all digital, according to Melchiorre. "We're not talking about cutting 20 people from a call center. We're talking about how you keep your business so someone else doesn't take it away."

Melchiorre heads sales, operations and finance. iPipeline chief executive Tim Wallace remains boss for strategy and acquisitions. The firm employs 350, including newly acquired European, Canadian and Asian offices.

"They took the sales to $60 million. How do we get its value to $1 billion?" said Michael DiPiano, head of Radnor-based NewSpring Capital, one of iPipeline's investors. That will be Melchiorre's job.

Newspring, by the way, is having a busy year: DiPiano's team recently finished raising $200 million for its third investment fund. Last month, Blackstone Group agreed to pay $600 million for one of Newspring's portfolio companies, GCA Services Group, the formerly King of Prussia-based janitorial contractor started by Philadelphia investor Graeme Crothall. GCA is now based in Chicago.

Melchiorre is also invested in a string of small companies - among them Maryland-based e-mail system supplier Message Systems, whose clients include Facebook; Seattle electronic-signatures developer DocuSign; Fort Washington Web data-tracker ListenLogic; and Plymouth Meeting-based ExpenseWatch, whose past investors included Amazon.com boss Jeff Bezos.

With Ariba's sale, couldn't Melchiorre afford to relax? "I'm 51, I could have retired 10 years ago," he told me. "I do this for fun. My wife would throw me out if I stayed home."

How are the pickets? I asked Joseph Otis Minott, who runs the Philadelphia Clean Air Council. "Very polite," he told me.

Members of the United Steelworkers visited council headquarters at 19th and Walnut on Friday and again on Monday to object to the council's appeal of a state Department of Environmental Protection plan to give the former Sunoco refinery in Philadelphia permission to emit more pollutants.

"We value the work of the Clean Air Council [but] we respectfully disagree," Steelworkers' president Leo Gerard wrote in a statement Monday.

Contrast what DEP boss Michael Krancer put in his note to my colleague Andrew Maykuth last week: "This [council] suit stabs in the back 22,000 union and other workers and their families in Southeastern PA." (The plant would employ around 1,000.) He called those who challenged DEP's plan "out-of-touch, extreme organizations."

I checked the Clean Air Council's board list: a Comcast accountant, a former IBM executive, an engineering-firm headhunter, a La Salle University administrator, and others whose resumes were long on organized outdoor activities. Not too radical.

The Clean Air Council particularly objects to the way DEP lumps closed-down facilities - such as Sunoco's former Marcus Hook refinery - with active refiners in limiting future emissions, but discourages combining natural-gas "fracking" sites in measuring their possible threat.

Maybe that's the Clean Air folks' real offense - to a state government that has staked its reputation on making it the easiest place in America to draw fuel from deep underground.