Our Core Beliefs

The cloud is a better way and it impacts everything (not just IT)

Cloud computing is having a profound effect on IT (and vendors selling to IT), but the impact that cloud platforms can have resonates far beyond an IT organization. Cloud solutions and the new business models and processes that they enable can make companies significantly more efficient, effective, agile and responsive to the new trends shaping how we work. Imagine a sales team managing their interactions and business from an iPad. Or a marketing organization using social platforms to get closer to customers. Or employees that wanted access to their systems from anywhere, at any time. With traditional systems, this might not be possible without significant investment or re-engineering. With public cloud solutions, it’s not only possible, it’s almost a given.

Appirio’s founders—four reformed enterprise software executives who spent years designing and implementing traditional IT solutions—saw the potential of the cloud back in 2006. Since then cloud platforms have matured significantly and companies — many of them Appirio customers—have proven that moving to the cloud can improve existing business processes and reshape their interactions with customers, partners, and employees.

Technology solutions should be focused on the user, not the data

Most traditional IT systems have a common weakness—they focus on data, not the people who use that data and how that data is used. Cloud solutions inherently provide a much better user experience than traditional software, but unfortunately, when companies approach these solutions in the same old way, they don’t get the ROI they expect. Of course you need to think about data models, profiles, integration and reporting, but don’t do so at the expense of the user’s experience which has just as big of an impact on the project’s overall success. Appirio works with customers to think through both the technical and the people aspects of a project—whether that’s implementing a new CRM or self-service HCM solution or developing a custom application from scratch.

Powering a business with the cloud requires a new way of thinking

If you want to see the full benefit of moving to the cloud, don’t expect to do things the way you did them in the past. Instead of spending a year implementing a solution and launching it with a big bang, take a more iterative approach where you can see results fast. Then adapt. Instead of automating the same old process with a better piece of technology, think through how that technology can improve the process. If you’re planning to power your business with the cloud, you can’t architect a solution, deploy and maintain a system, source projects or build a team in the same old way. That’s why we don’t, and one of the reasons we’ve become the industry’s most trusted cloud advisor.

You shouldn’t sell what you don’t use yourself

You wouldn’t buy a boat from someone who had never seen the water. So why would a company looking to move to the cloud want to partner with a service provider that didn’t have first-hand knowledge of the technologies they were selling or implementing? This is why we at Appirio have vowed never to own a server. We run our business entirely in the cloud—on the solutions that we sell. We use Salesforce CRM and a number of AppExchange solutions for marketing, sales, support and more. Workday for HR and Financials. Google Apps for communication and collaboration. Amazon Web Services, Heroku and Force.com to build out our proprietary technology and tools. This gives us unique insight into the opportunities, challenges and evolution of these platforms.

Culture is everything

When you set out to build a company bent on disrupting a $3 trillion industry, you need a team that feels as passionately about the goal as you. As a people–based business, we spend a disproportionate amount of time making sure we hire the right people and foster a culture that keeps them engaged, focused and constantly pushing boundaries. The core values that we hire against (trust, professionalism and intelligence), mesh with the values upon which we model our business (customers, team, and fun) to make sure that we are a company that people want to work with and for—both now and in the future.