Thursday, April 24, 2008
Living the Dream - Salesforce, Google and SaaS
Chris Barbin
We at Appirio have lots of experience at big technology companies (SAP, webMethods, Borland) and classic enterprise software startups. We run Appirio differently from what we saw at these companies. We not only run our business using software as a service technology, we base our entire business model on it.
Eating our own dogfood: In February 2007 we blogged about how we’re using an on-demand infrastructure to run our business. We got great coverage for eating our own dogfood as a way to increase our own profitability, but also to live the dream that we're selling our customers.
Appirio doesn’t own a single server, and never will. We’re not fanatics about this -- we’re just doing what’s right for the business (OK, and maybe that does make us fanatics!). It’s remarkable that when you get the chance to start from scratch it never occurs to you to buy servers and invest in on-premise software. You just don’t need to accept those constraints anymore. Some skeptics out there doubt a successful growing business can manage without its own servers, but we're happy to prove them wrong.
In the past year, we’ve expanded our on-demand infrastructure. We went from a early startup to a company with processes for most things. That has required we leverage our Salesforce instance as a platform - providing every employee with a platform license (nearly 100 by the end of 08) - and ramping up our usage of Google Apps.
While we have outsourced where possible (payroll, health care administration), we have also built a host of fully integrated custom applications to run our business and manage such things as IT assets, vacation approvals, utilization tracking, HR and benefits, and even our stock option program. This has allowed us to:
- Review thousands of resumes and track hundreds of candidates and interviews - Interviewers and recruiters located across the country seamlessly manage the process and track metrics like response time, time to hire, average interview score, most successful lead sources, etc. In our business, anything less than recruiting and on-boarding excellence spells doom for the company.
- Initiate On-boarding processes with a single click of the"You're Hired" button in our application. This automatically puts in place the configuration and workflow for key tasks to get someone integrated into payroll, HR, and all of the other items listed above. Its not uncommon for an employee to be completely past the administrative aspects of getting started by the afternoon of their first day.
- Manage over 100 successful Salesforce and Google projects for enterprise customers. We manage product status, milestones, hours spent, utilization, skills matrix, etc. all through a single system that our own sales, service and support functions all have access to.
- Rollout support processes (case management, knowledge base, workflow, etc.) for our own product offerings in a pragmatic way. We can support part time, full time, and outsourced support models with just simple configuration adjustments.
- Use Google Sites to manage our entire intranet which includes sales, service and product assets, metholdology instructions and templates, sample deliverables and even add some personality to the business by having every employee create their own "People Page"
We’ve also expanded our use of Google Apps for communications and collaboration, using Google Docs, the new Google Sites for our intranet, Google Groups for listservs, and even a trial of Grand Central for telephony. We even have an application on Force.com that calculates the standings in our company ping pong and foosball leagues (look for it on Appexchange soon!).
We've experienced a number of benefits from running our business using an on-demand infrastructure, including:
- Cost: This is the easy one. We’ll write soon with a detailed comparison of the cost of this infrastructure versus what we would have spent for on-premise software. Saving the upfront license fees are only part of the equation—the real benefits come from the ongoing savings of not having to maintain the software and infrastructure.
- Flexibility and agility: Our infrastructure allowed us to smoothly quadruple the size of our team last year. We’re able to hire the best and brightest, regardless of geographic location. They’re able to get up to speed quickly without installing, configuring, or learning new software interfaces. As a result, we see a faster ramp up — our employees are up-to-speed at least a week faster than we’ve experienced in a traditional technology environment.
- Process effectiveness: Our on-demand infrastructure makes Appirio more effective in serving our customers. We turn new ideas into solutions quickly because nobody needs to submit a PO for HW/SW/Projects for small changes that return big benefits. We see a new solution's benefits and short-comings earlier in the process and can adapt from there. And we can solve customer problems faster thanks to an on-demand knowledge base that people actually use.
Coming Next - Part II - Powering our business model
Friday, April 18, 2008
Touring the Country with salesforce.com and Google
Narinder Singh
What an exciting week between Google and Salesforce! Let's recap with our perspective on Monday’s announcement event, and Wednesday’s Tour de Force marketing stop in New York City. A few overall observations:
- Expanding awareness: It’s clear that the market is starting to understand the power of platform as a service. Between Marc Benioff’s continuing evangelism of Force.com, Google’s campfire event in Mountain View to launch their AppEngine, and all the discussion this week about bringing Salesforce and Google together, companies are starting to think more broadly about how to combine the capabilities of Salesforce and Google. In our conversations with customers this week, there was more excitement than ever about the types of applications that are now possible.
- Expanding vision: The broader idea that’s starting to emerge from all these conversations is a vision for a new generation of applications that are now possible in the space between structured business applications like CRM, and completely unstructured business activity like email. This is a theme Google CEO Eric Schmidt touched on Monday that we’ll be returning to on this blog frequently.
- Role of partners: The importance the partners of Salesforce and Google to help customers make the most of these capabilities is becoming increasingly clear. A proof point is the role played by that partners in Monday’s Google announcement, and in the Tour de Force events. Salesforce and Google relied on their partner ecosystem to provide so much of the functionality powering Salesforce for Google Apps. This is a tremendous vote of confidence.
Much of the positioning around the announcement has been as a "Dream Come True." We agree! And we look forward to working with our customers and partners to make all this a reality in your enterprise. Until then, enjoy the sweets from Monday's announcement (below).
Labels: force, Google, Salesforce for Google Apps, salesforce.com, Tour De Force
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Google and salesforce.com : Solutions for business, meet solutions for businesspeople
Ryan Nichols
Salesforce, meet Google Apps… this is an introduction we’re happy to make and an occasion we are excited to be a part of. As the first partner of both Google Enterprise and salesforce.com, Appirio is excited to see these two leaders in on-demand solutions come together to change the way that business is done.
Salesforce has revolutionized software for business. Their on-demand solutions for business have changed what it means to develop, deploy, customize, and use a business solution. Google has revolutionized software for business people. Their on-demand solutions for business people have un-chained us from our desktop productivity applications and changed the way that business people interact with information and with each other.
The technology of their joint offering is exciting enough: Use Gmail and Gtalk directly from Salesforce. Find and add Google Docs as you work in Salesforce. Synchronize your Google Calendar and your Salesforce Calendar. Create Google Gadgets from your CRM data. We’ve been working closely with our partners at salesforce.com and Google to make much of this possible.
But what gets us excited is how we plan on using this technology to impact the business of our customers. Bringing Salesforce and Google Apps together solves one of the biggest pain points companies have today—the gap between the tools that businesses need to run and the tools that people use to work.
Businesses suffer when the tools that support these two types of activities aren’t connected. First, of course, is the cost in productivity and efficiency—everyone has experienced how much time is wasted copying, pasting, importing, exporting, and plain old retyping to bridge these different tool sets.
But the real cost is misalignment. When the communication and collaboration of business people occurs without the context of business information, or when a business process occurs without the context of communication and collaboration, the outcome is certain: poor decisions, poorly executed.
Traditional enterprise software companies have failed to bridge this gap. The excitement around each new announcement between a traditional provider of solutions for business (e.g., SAP) and a traditional provider of solutions for business people (e.g., Microsoft) quickly fades to disappointment and failed expectations. This failure is inevitable because on-premise software is too inflexible to bridge this gap. The simple fact that enterprises would have to spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade to recent versions of SAP and Microsoft before thinking about joint solutions dooms the effort.
On-Demand changes all of this...again.
Today’s announcement and the future
On-demand solutions offer the potential to finally the bridge the gap between the tools that businesses need to run and the tools that people use to get things done. That’s what makes today’s announcement so exciting. Building on the platform salesforce and Google are providing, Appirio is delivering four new products that allow Salesforce and Google users to easily synchronize calendars, collaborate on marketing campaigns, find and embed documents, and create and share customized CRM dashboards. In addition, we have expanded our services for Google and salesforce customers to leverage these new offerings.
At Appirio, we’re already using Google and Salesforce together to change how our customers do business:
- Helping account teams collaborate in the context of their customer information in Google Documents and Sites
- Helping marketing teams coordinate their campaign timelines using Google Calendar
- Helping service and support teams leverage a knowledge base of their collective experience, captured in Google Documents and Sites
Over the past several months, we have helped numerous customers, including salesforce.com, benefit from Google Apps. Creating products and services to bring Google and Salesforce together in the enterprise provides Appirio a unique perspective. We believe that on-demand offers a way for providers like salesforce.com, Google, and Appirio to create compelling solutions for customers that cannot be matched by the rigidity of the on-premise approach. While this future may take time to reach all parts of the market, we believe it is inevitable and every enterprise needs to find a path to that future. We look forward to doing our part to help....
Labels: Google Apps, SaaS, salesforce, Salesforce for Google Apps
Monday, April 07, 2008
What Do You Get When You Cross Salesforce.com and Amazon S3?
Narinder Singh
You get Appirio Cloud Storage for Salesforce.com, a new SaaS offering from Appirio that taps Amazon S3 to extend the storage capabilities of Salesforce.com. (We toyed with calling it SalAmaForce3 but didn't really see that flying.)
Appirio Cloud Storage [press release] lets Salesforce.com users store more documents and larger size files - such as customer support logs, software patches or video presentations - directly through the Salesforce.com interface, at a fraction of the price of existing storage solutions. The new SaaS offering creates a secure integration with the Amazon.com utility storage service and provides the ability to store documents up to 1GB in size (200x current limits).
Feedback from our beta users shows that is has the potential to reduce existing Salesforce.com storage costs by over 80 percent while enabling them to get more mileage out of their on-demand applications. The service, available in three levels of monthly web-based pricing, can be purchased today on AppExchange or on www.appirio.com.
Connecting the Clouds: A Sign of More to Come
We're excited not only about the service itself, but also what it represents. It shows where the industry as a whole can head - as the platforms mature, there is a substantial opportunity for ISVs to tie together the different clouds and provide offerings that extend and fill in the platforms themselves. In traditional enterprise application integration (EAI), packaged integrations were difficult to commercialize. The permutation of versions and customizations created and "n times n" problem, making it too expensive to create something "packaged" that appealed to more than a very small number of customers. But in the cloud, because SaaS providers commit to stable interfaces - Salesforce has maintained backwards compatability for more than a dozen revisions of its API - "integrating the cloud" can become a new class of solution.
Today's platforms will continue to evolve, and innovative companies will find new ways to bring them together. Appirio Cloud Storage is only one of the many products that Appirio will be offering in this camp over the coming year. Stay tuned!
Photo credit: MaxChu on Flickr
Labels: Amazon S3, appirio, Elastic Cloud Computing, Force.com, on-demand storage, SaaS integration, salesforce.com