How does Roster compare to Ramp, Rippling and AbstractOps, and are they potential partners or competitors?

Definitely partnering. We're customers of AbstractOps, Rippling and Ramp. The Ops nomenclature is tough because it’s referred to in many different  contexts. The nuances are actually really hard to parse out from a one-liner since the Ops role in organizations is rapidly evolving. All of these different companies need to get better at messaging and be more precise about it, ourselves included. 

A good analogy for what Roster wants to build is: what Salesforce built for sales, what Rippling is now building for HR/IT, we want to build that for functional Ops.

Rippling’s data schema is around employee records. On top of that, they have built a robust product portfolio that covers where all this employee info is deeply embedded. AbstractOps’ is around company records, an intelligent index for all company back-office items, including a vault of documents relating to stakeholders and company relationships with those stakeholders. 

Ramp's is around all spend transactions  that your company has done. And they’ve built expense management, bill pay, and vendor negotiations on top of that.