Monday, January 15, 2007
Significant Announcement - Appirio and Salesforce.com
The below press release will hit the wire at 7am EST on January 16th. The announcement celebrates some high profile additions to the team and how extremely excited we are about On-Demand, Salesforce.com and Winter 07 + Apex. In 2007 interest in On-Demand from large enterprises will grow dramatically; we look forward to helping those companies avoid 'SAAS Silos' and create a cohesive On-Demand strategy, architecture, and approach.
[Read Full Release]
Former Enterprise Software Executives Join Appirio to Accelerate the Shift to On-Demand Business Applications
Executives from SAP, Borland, and webMethods leverage Salesforce.com and the Apex platform to accelerate on-demand adoption in enterprise customers
San Francisco, Calif., - January 16, 2006 -- Appirio, a services and product firm focused on accelerating the adoption of on-demand applications in the enterprise, today announced the addition of senior enterprise software executives and several major enterprise customer wins. Recognizing the paradigm shift from on-premise to on-demand for packaged and custom applications, Appirio helps enterprise customers unlock business value and reduce IT costs by accelerating their adoption of salesforce.com’s suite of on-demand CRM applications and building on salesforce.com’s Apex, the leading platform for developing custom on-demand applications. “
Recent Appirio customer acquisitions include CRC Health Group, Borland Software Corporation, and ServiceSource.
CRC Health Group, the nation's largest provider of drug and alcohol treatment services, has engaged Appirio to deliver an on-demand application strategy and design a new platform to support their client pre-admissions process. Howard Brown, CRC’s vice president of marketing, said that “Appirio’s ability to understand our business has allowed us to push forward with our on-demand strategy in a manner completely consistent with our business strategy.”
Since its initial launch in September 2006, Appirio has also released three sales and support productivity widgets on AppExchange, Salesforce.com’s marketplace for third-party applications. More than 3,000 customers have downloaded these Yahoo and Google widgets. In addition, Appirio is an inaugural member of the salesforce.com AppExchange incubator program and is developing a number of other applications for salesforce.com customers.
“On-demand applications are a classic business disruption to the model of traditional on-premise applications,” said Appirio’s CEO, Chris Barbin. “Salesforce.com can innovate more rapidly, and the effect is amplified because partners can add value to a single, unified platform. Developing and launching applications to the full SAP or Oracle customer base would require ten to twenty times the effort, in order to cover all existing versions, operating systems, and customizations deployed to each customer. We believe the promise and direction of the Apex platform, as demonstrated in the Salesforce Winter ’07 release and the upcoming roadmap, is a game changer for Appirio and our customers.”
Saturday, January 06, 2007
Running a Tech Support Department on SaaS
There is a quiet revolution taking place in Technical Support departments. Without fanfare or a major marketing push, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is making real inroads, displacing traditional technologies.
Call Centers - The Last Bastion of Change
The "call center," an old-fashioned label still applied even to high-end complex support departments, is one of the last bastions against change. The same vendors sell the same solutions, year after year, into what has become a stale marketplace. But this staleness has indirectly created a virtuous circle - as vendors have essentially lost interest in their now-commodized products, and their quality and innovation have slipped noticeably, today's generation of support executives has begun to embrace solutions that provide more reliability and flexibility. What has begun as a ripple will soon grow to a full-blown tidal wave as SaaS moves into the heart of the call center.
Online Chat - SaaS Enters the Scene
Many support shops began experimenting with SaaS - without fully realizing it, or categorizing their efforts as "SaaS experiments" - when they started rolling out online chat several years ago. Vendors such as LivePerson, InstantService, Proficient(now acquired by LivePerson), and NetSupport 24-7 allowed support agents to use an important new channel - instant messaging - to talk to customers. Nobody called it "SaaS," but it was a textbook example - no servers for the customer to install, and a true multi-tenant architecture at the vendor. Support executives noticed how easy it all was to set up and maintain - an early taste of the "freedom from IT" that has made SaaS so popular in the sales force automation (SFA) market.
Customer Surveys - SaaS Is The Answer
Customer surveys were another early area of SaaS adoption for technical support. At one Appirio employee's former company three years ago, an eager support engineer wrote a survey system from scratch. Six months later they migrated their surveys to QuestionPro - it was just too hard to keep up with server status, change requests, bug fixes, database issues, and the like. More importantly, there was no reason to even try. Plenty of vendors offered robust survey solutions for surprisingly low fees - not just QuestionPro, but Clicktools, ZipSurvey, and others. The common denominator? All are true hosted SaaS solutions - with robust web-based configuration tools, 24x7 availability, and easy access. Even for a bunch of techies such as support team managers, the lure of ease-of-use trumps NIH ("not invented here") every time. If a manager wants to change a survey question or view recent survey results, she can simply call up a URL - instead of asking "hey, who wrote that survey app for us? Where's it hosted again? Do you remember how to get a database extract?"
You Mean SaaS Can Even Run My Phone Systems?
More recently, support managers, tired of dealing with instability and vendor indifference, have started looking for solutions to more traditional support-related services, like telephone automatic call distribution (ACD) and interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Traditional ACD/IVR vendors like Aspect and Lucent still, in 2007, product archaic documentation, impossible-to-configure products, and expensive hardware that requires dedicated IT staff. Support managers quickly learn to stop asking for configuration changes, and make the best with what they've got. Then, they learn of an alternative - SaaS ACD vendors such as Angel.com, Contactual, and UCN InContact, along with IVR vendors like Angel.com, Metaphor, and Five9. At first, it seems too good to be true - hosted ACD? But the success stories are starting to pile up - support teams can now change their queues and routing rules on-the-fly, troubleshoot problems without IT's assistance, and react more quickly to their customers' demands.
The Final CRM Frontier - Case and Contract Management
We are at an inflection point today in the support industry. Nearly all support shops are now running some combination of SaaS applications. But relatively few have taken the plunge and converted their core CRM case and contract management systems to SaaS. Vendors such as Salesforce.com are turning their focus from SFA - an increasingly saturated SaaS market - to Service & Support (S&S) systems. Their S&S product offerings are quickly maturing as the vendors dedicate ever-larger proportions of the R&D budget to S&S. SaaS is a natural fit for the support shop - especially within companies that have already adopted SaaS-based SFA solutions. Where the sales department has broken off from the corporate IT infrastructure to run their businesses on SaaS, the support department can now re-join the system and share a common customer data model. The legacy vendors in S&S have grown just as stale as those in ACD and IVR - just one glance at the agent GUIs offered today in systems from Oracle (Siebel, Vantive), Amdocs (Clarify), and BMC (Remedy) will confirm that these vendors have downshifted into maintenance mode. In contrast, SaaS vendors are innovating at a torrid pace, creating an inviting environment for any support professional interested in experimenting with new ways to better serve customers.
To be sure, SaaS vendors have a tough battle ahead in order to grab their share of the dollars currently being sent to the likes of Oracle and Amdocs for product maintenance. But support executives won't keep sending in their annual maintenance check much longer, especially when they compare the size of these hefty payments to the cost of the same number of seats with a SaaS S&S vendor. The proven track record for SaaS in the call center has paved the way for the ultimate shift - a serverless call center, relying fully on SaaS vendors for all its operations.