Appirio Total Feeds

[Twittersphere] RT @appirio: RT @jrichlive: RT @GGVCapital: Why Twitter Is an Important Weapon for #Startup CEOs from @jrichlive http://t.co/OO5vHPDS #appirio

mdenisiap (Denisia Pereira) — Fri, 25 May 2012 18:01:04 +0000

[Twittersphere] RT @appcloudfactor: Save emails, ceate Cases, Contacts, Events, Accounts, Opps, Leads, & Tasks in #Salesforce w/o leaving #GoogleApps. http://t.co/J8Tq7QgV

appirio (Appirio) — Fri, 25 May 2012 17:12:37 +0000

[Twittersphere] NY Times' Adam Bryant interviews Chris Barbin of Appirio about the challenges of leading a company. Great read! http://t.co/sowRdlTo

ScanlonJim (Jim Scanlon) — Fri, 25 May 2012 17:02:04 +0000

[Twittersphere] “@appcloudfactor: Check out the pics from @appirio's after party at #Cloudforce London....Yes. That is a robot. http://t.co/IJrShMi6”

dent_jason (Jason Dent) — Fri, 25 May 2012 16:48:29 +0000

[Twittersphere] Interview Chris Barbin @appirio | NYT http://t.co/7dkPlwnC

seanleoryan (Sean Leo Ryan) — Fri, 25 May 2012 16:21:04 +0000

[Twittersphere] "This is why we’re so excited about CloudSpokes, which sits right at the intersection of crowdsourcing and cloud dev" http://t.co/4g06zSQv

appirio (Appirio) — Fri, 25 May 2012 16:09:01 +0000

[Twittersphere] Corner Office | Chris Barbin: Chris Barbin of Appirio, on Boiling Down Answers http://t.co/HT8zCgwl

dahawe (Dan Weiss) — Fri, 25 May 2012 16:04:05 +0000

http://t.co/HT8zCgwl

[Twittersphere] RT @appirio: RT @jrichlive: RT @GGVCapital: Why Twitter Is an Important Weapon for #Startup CEOs from @jrichlive http://t.co/OO5vHPDS #appirio

cloud_griff (Chris J Griffin) — Fri, 25 May 2012 15:54:49 +0000

[Twittersphere] RT @jrichlive: RT @GGVCapital: Why Twitter Is an Important Weapon for #Startup CEOs from @jrichlive http://t.co/OO5vHPDS #appirio

appirio (Appirio) — Fri, 25 May 2012 15:29:55 +0000

[Twittersphere] Check out the pics from @appirio's after party at #Cloudforce London....Yes. That is a robot. http://t.co/yTe2Nk2r

appcloudfactor (Appirio CloudFactor) — Fri, 25 May 2012 15:21:33 +0000

[Twittersphere] Appirio is looking for: Workday Consultant (Payroll) http://t.co/pfxaMKR7 #job

nDaCloud (Matt Castleman) — Fri, 25 May 2012 14:55:30 +0000

http://t.co/pfxaMKR7 #job

[Twittersphere] Appirio is looking for: Workday Consultant (HCM) http://t.co/hfOYJWQ3 #job

nDaCloud (Matt Castleman) — Fri, 25 May 2012 14:55:06 +0000

http://t.co/hfOYJWQ3 #job

[Twittersphere] @kylebowerman Sure is. I shadowed there my first week at Appirio and needed a pic for all the internal systems.

Nick_Whitney (Nicholas Whitney) — Fri, 25 May 2012 13:32:19 +0000

[Twittersphere] Appirio is looking for: Product Support Engineer http://t.co/nz3Nf0AL #job

seanantle (Sean Antle) — Fri, 25 May 2012 07:17:37 +0000

http://t.co/nz3Nf0AL #job

[Twittersphere] RT @aneelb: In One Adjective, Please Tell Me Who You Are http://t.co/VT98Yihj. Great interview. @c_barbin @appirio @singhns

MikeLloydOBrien (Mike O'Brien) — Fri, 25 May 2012 01:08:46 +0000

[Blog] 257 Cloud apps from the Crowd: A CloudSpokes Update

Sal Partovi — Wed, 23 May 2012 09:45:00 +0000

By Sal Partovi (@spartovi)

It’s been nearly a year since we last updated this group on CloudSpokes - a crowdsourcing development community focused on the cloud.

In the past, we shared how our crowd in the cloud has given back to the open-source community for furthering cloud development, how crowdsourcing can increase innovation, provided arguments for looking outside company walls to achieve open innovation, and summed up the first year highlighting some of the apps and partner work from CloudSpokes’ inaugural year.

As we’ve stated before, “The flexibility of cloud platforms has created a unique point where, for the first time, dramatic innovation can occur with both the underlying technology model and how results are delivered to businesses. With an Internet connection and some expertise, the world can be your development partner.”

This concept of the cloud accelerating crowdsourcing is echoed by GigaOM, “The Netflix Prize challenge in 2009 attracted more than 50,000 participants trying to improve Netflix’s Cinematch algorithm, and today we have Kaggle — an entire company dedicated to hosting competitions for companies trying to crowdsource their own analytical challenges. And it’s the cloud, with its centralized nature, virtually unlimited and on-demand resources, that makes it possible to have so many people access and work with the same data sets at the same time.” This is why we’re so excited about CloudSpokes, which sits right at the intersection of crowdsourcing and cloud development on its merry way to disrupt an industry.

There are many examples of us using CloudSpokes to our own benefit within Appirio, but one of our proudest examples of CloudSpokes in action is the migration of the CloudSpokes platform itself from Azure to Heroku and Database.com, performed almost entirely by the community itself. We love that the community built the community, it’s so... perfect. Again quoting GigaOM: “Because CloudSpokes crowdsourced the development of various aspects of the site, submissions came in using all sorts of languages and cloud platforms. When the new Database.com-based site is flipped on near the end of this month, the front end will run on Heroku, and the middle tier will run on a combination of Heroku-, Google App Engine- and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk-based services.” Below is a sample of a few of the challenges (some code based, some design based) we ran to rebuild the site from the ground up:

For more on the migration, see our talk here.

And we’re not the only ones using CloudSpokes to crowdsource innovation. During the past 15 months CloudSpokes has become an important vehicle for our customers to deliver innovative solutions. We’re overdue in describing some of these real world examples of how a 40,000+ member cloud development community can contribute to enterprise app dev, so here are a few recent challenges our enterprise customers have run:

Twilio SMS for Force.com: An application that allows a user to send and receive SMS messages for contacts in Salesforce.com. Run by one of the largest, private sector universities in North America as a new way to engage with students.
FTP with Google App Engine: An App Engine application that allows uploading and downloading files via FTP. Run by a biotechnology corporation as an extension to an app being built on App Engine
Chatter Compliance: An application designed to filter out chatter posts according to identifiers configured by an administrator. All feed items and comments will be checked against a list of configured patterns. If a match is made, an email with the post will be mailed to a configured system account and the offending text will be replaced. Run by a medical device manufacturing company who wanted to use Salesforce Chatter for collaboration but needed to implement compliance controls.
Mobile Lead Conversion: An HTML5 mobile lead conversion app using the new Salesforce Mobile SDK. The application displays a list of leads on a user’s phone/tablet and allow the user to quickly convert a lead to an existing account or a new account. Run by a technology company focused on storage and data management as a new way for mobile sales reps to better manage CRM.
Weighted Round Robin Assignment Engine: A sales lead assignment engine that determines a way to assign new leads and opportunities to top producers (so that top producers receive the most leads by number) while still distributing leads fairly to the rest of the sales team. Run by a company specializing in green home energy to better help manage leads after industry events.
Google calendar free/busy lookup within SFDC: An interface in Salesforce that looks up Google Apps Free/Busy data for a specified a Google Apps user(s), given a specified date range and availability of time. Run by a large media company as a way to manage corporate calendar information within CRM.

The crowd in the cloud was announced as a match made for the enterprise. Now 15 months, 257 apps, 40,000+ members (in 65+ countries), and $465,000+ in awards later, CloudSpokes has clearly proven that success. The old model is dead, and the Crowd in the Cloud is real and here to stay.

Interested in seeing how a community of experts can help your business innovate? We recommend checking out crowdsourcing pioneers like 99designs for design work and Tongal for creative video for starters. If you’re ready to jump into application development, start by architecting your applications so the pieces are independent. Loosely coupled elements of a larger project are simply easier to parse out to a development community, and easier for a community to digest. Once you're ready to post your first development challenge, check out the open list of challenges and the CloudSpokes blog for inspiration. And if you have any questions along the way, tweet @CloudSpokes.

[Blog] Cloud Security and Availability: Better or Worse?

Appirio — Mon, 14 May 2012 11:20:00 +0000

Balakrishna Narasimhan (@bnara75)

A few days ago, Cisco released the results of a survey with 1,300 IT decision-makers and influencers from across the world. In summary, Cisco found that cloud adoption is being driven from executive levels but IT decision-makers continue to be held back by concerns around visibility, security, availability and performance.

This picture stands in stark contrast to what we observe among our customers and prospects who are focused on driving business results using cloud solutions.

The explanation lies in the difference between how people perceive cloud solutions before they have used them vs. their perceptions after using cloud solutions. In late 2010, we worked with a leading 3rd party survey company to understand the experience of cloud adopters at ~150 mid to large enterprises.

As expected, we found that those who had actually used cloud applications and platforms found that their cloud solutions were easier to maintain, cheaper and more flexible. More surprisingly, we also found that the vast majority of cloud adopters found their cloud solutions to be AS GOOD OR BETTER than on-premise solutions for security, availability and reliability. Clearly, once people actually use cloud applications and platforms, their perceptions about past objections change dramatically.

So, what does this mean for those who are evaluating cloud solutions? Based on our experience with 100s of enterprises, we recommend two immediate actions:

First, get educated about the security and reliability of the cloud solutions you’re considering. Most cloud solutions offer a “trust” site where they share availability, performance and downtime information. See for yourself if the cloud application is more or less available than what you provide internally.
Second, try out the cloud application to see how it performs for you. Unlike traditional solutions, most cloud solutions offer simple trials so you can be up and running without much investment and no more infrastructure than your web browser.

Ultimately, each organization needs to make a decision that makes the most sense given their business priorities. But, for many organizations, cloud solutions offer a superior experience at a lower cost so they’re definitely worth a look!

[Blog] Maintaining Your IT Fitness Level

Appirio — Fri, 11 May 2012 15:21:00 +0000

Glenn Weinstein
CIO, Appirio
@glennweinstein

What’s the best single measure of IT success - increased productivity, or reduced spend? Two colleagues staked out opposite positions on this blog recently. As CIO at Appirio, naturally, my instinct is to cop out and say “both are important.” But let me be more specific.

Let’s think of IT as an athlete on our corporate team. We want lean, well-conditioned athletes at all positions. Getting a team ready to play means getting everyone in shape. The first step might be to set a goal weight. This goal will be different depending on the type of sport, and the position. An Olympic gymnast will likely have a very different goal weight than an NFL lineman. While there is no right or wrong goal weight, we all know that being overweight is never good for fitness.

Think of your total IT costs like your goal weight. It makes no sense to try to come up with a single number (e.g. “less than 3% of revenues”) that’s right for everyone. Set a target based on the kind of company you are, and the market you play in. Certain industries, such as financial services or consulting, naturally rely more heavily on tech spending than others, such as retail or construction.

Athlete can take both healthy and unhealthy steps towards reaching a goal weight. They can eat nutritious foods, or they can go on a starvation diet. CIOs also have healthy and unhealthy options. They can ensure funds are allocated towards technologies that yield the best returns, or they can cut essential productivity tools and defer needed upgrades in the single-focused pursuit of cost reduction.

Once you set a goal weight that’s right for your company, you’ll want to focus on your overall fitness level, and the abilities you derive from it. A good athlete eliminates wasted motion, improves technique, and is able to put most of their strength behind their action, whether it’s performing a backflip or swinging a bat. The IT equivalent is how you spend your limited IT budget, typically broken into three categories - run (nondiscretionary spend on continued operations), grow (supporting organic business growth), and transform (supporting new business models).

Gartner’s January 2012 “IT Metrics: IT Spending and Staffing Report” shows that, on average, 63% of our spend is on “run,” with only 21% on “grow” and 16% on “transform.” While these numbers are trending in the right direction - in 2007, they were 67%, 20%, and 13%, respectively - the amount of spend dedicated towards maintaining the status quo remains far too high in our industry. This is like a baseball player who isn’t leaning into the pitch and is hitting off the back foot. Instead of driving the ball, we’re limply popping out to the infield.

My own experience, both as Appirio CIO and as an adviser to many of our customers, is that shifting towards cloud computing enables a major focus shift away from “run” expenditures. Fewer people and resources are needed to keep the lights on, so the “build” and “transform” projects get more IT attention. I think we can flip the 63/37 ratio over the next several years by continuing the transformation towards public-cloud-enabled IT. It’s like a hitter who starts taking more solid swings at the ball, hits more line drives, and ultimately drives in more runs.

Therefore, the best single measure of IT success - assuming you’re at your goal weight and in peak physical condition (i.e. your IT spend is right-sized for your business) - is how much of your IT spend you’re able to put towards growing and transforming, rather than merely running, your business.

Play ball!

[Blog] What is the #1 Metric for IT Success: Business Impact, Cost Savings or Something Else?

Appirio — Tue, 08 May 2012 08:30:00 +0000

By Nara Balakrishna(@bnara75) and Steve Pruden (@stpruden)

Michael Krigsman’s recent post estimating the worldwide cost of IT failure at $3T sparked an internal debate about technology investments and how to measure IT success. In the traditional view of IT as a cost center, success is measured in primarily in terms of IT cost as a percent of revenue. IT leaders are applauded when they can deliver projects under budget, on time, and keep the overall cost low as a percent of revenue. But, is this actually good for the business?

The cost-center view of IT has been challenged recently by the advent of technologies such as cloud, social and mobile that have the potential to impact top-line metrics such as customer engagement, retention, cross-sell and more. In fact, the Hackett group has found that world class companies invest 5% more than the median on technology while spending far less than in areas like Finance, HR and Procurement. Why is this? Is it because forward-thinking companies recognize that IT can be a differentiator and a strategic enabler?

Battle of the Brains - Appirio Experts Debate the Best Single Metric
So, the question we’re debating is, “How IT should be measured?” Is it business impact, cost savings or something else entirely? Here’s one case for business impact as the metric:

On the flip side, here is a case to continue viewing IT as a cost center, where success is measured primarily in terms of IT cost as a percent of revenue:

We’d also love to hear from you. What do you think? Please add your thoughts in comments or tweet them using #appirio #itsuccess.

[Blog] The CIO of the Future: Conductor not Controller

Appirio — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 06:00:00 +0000

Balakrishna Narasimhan (@bnara75) and Naoki Tsukamoto (@nikes63)

How will the cloud change the future of the CIO? At Appirio, we have the privilege of working with innovative CIOs who are shaping their own companies as well as the industry as a whole. Experiences with these early “cloud first” CIOs provides us insight into how the role of the CIO will evolve in the future.

The pace of change in the IT industry is as rapid as ever and has only accelerated over the past few years. We’re now in the midst of a significant transformation of enterprise technology driven by cloud computing,mobility and social technologies. As the world changes, CIOs are losing decision-making power and many are out of the loop about cloud adoption within their own businesses. Yet, CIOs who embrace these new technologies and drive innovation (such as Enterasys’ Dan Petlon or Flextronics’ Dave Smoley) have become true business advisors and changed the role of IT within their businesses. Here’s what we’ve learned from these innovative CIOs.

Become a Conductor, Rather Than a Controller

Shrinking corporate IT budgets and innovative cloud services have made it possible for business users to fund their own cloud projects. However, without early IT involvement those investments, it will become expensive to scale across the company. Leading CIOs get involved early in cloud projects in order to become the local experts. Business units will then seek out the advice of these CIOs, providing the CIO with authority to influence the design of how all these cloud services will interact with each other, as well as with legacy systems. CIOs have to have the credibility to implement distributed controls, orchestrate a variety of services, and maintain a cohesive view of what's happening across the business. This trend was highlighted in a recent Forbes Article by Daryl Plummer, Gartner’s Chief of Cloud Research.

Focus on Business Outcomes, Rather Than Pure Cost Metrics

These CIOs have recognized that business value is in controlling the vision of outcomes without worrying about who does it. Traditional measures of success - like reducing headcount or fixed costs - are viewed by the business as low value add. CIOs that will have a game changing impact on their companies are instead those that can drive discussions on transforming business processes and orchestrate an IT system that can keep pace with the speed of change in their business. Tim Campos, CIO of Facebook, lives this by focusing his team away from managing the bits and bytes and instead to envisioning what it means to have efficient business processes. For example, by using cloud-based solutions to manage recruiting and offer letters, his team can focus on business outcomes such as why recruiting cycle times are slowing down and how recruiting processes can be improved to identify and recruit the best talent when it’s needed. In a traditional IT organization, all IT effort would’ve been focused on planning for capacity to handle inbound applications with little time to think about business outcomes. By using cloud solutions to free their teams from having to expend all of their effort to keep the lights on, these CIOs have been able to break IT out from being a cost center and into business process experts that deliver real business outcomes.

Focus on Your Internal Customers AND Your Business’ Customers

To deliver real business outcomes, CIOs must have their teams engage with all of their users which includes internal business unit customers but also their end customers. For example, a CRM solution is not complete when you have delivered a solution that helps sales teams manage their leads, accounts, contacts and opportunities. A true CRM solution is one that brings together a complete view of the customer to every interaction that the customer has with the company. Doing this involves bringing together multiple internal applications (sales, support, services, etc) as well as external applications (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, etc.) and creating solutions that bring the right information to the user at the right time. The shift is in thinking - not only about the person who will use the solution within the enterprise but also about the end-customer being served. The CIO of the future spends just as much time thinking about the company's network of stakeholders and how to best engage with them using technology as they do thinking about internal users.

Embrace Consumerization, Rather Than Fighting it

With the broad consumer adoption of devices like the iPhone and iPad, and applications like LinkedIn, Dropbox, Twitter, Evernote and many others, the paradigm of applications in the enterprise is changing dramatically. There are two takeaways for CIOs. First, this is a wave that cannot be controlled - employees will bring their own devices to work. Second, CIOs need to make sure the solutions they provide integrate with and provide a user experience that’s comparable to these applications that employees want to use. This means that CIOs and anyone who is developing enterprise applications need to focus on the user and find out how to create simple and compelling applications that fit within the user’s work process. The days of applications whose user interface stems from the way they store data is over. People will ignore applications that are hard to use and aren’t available on their favorite devices. While CIOs may be able to mandate usage of a small fraction of applications, in most cases applications will need to stand on their own merits. As a result, leading CIOs and IT departments are increasingly focused on what their users are trying to do and working with them iteratively to build what they need, rather than designing applications purely as systems of record. Of course this doesn’t mean throwing out what you have and starting from scratch but it does mean looking at current systems of record and understanding how the data and transactions they storecan be surfaced in new ways to engage end-users.

Extend Your Team with Crowdsourcing, Rather Than Increasing Headcount

The cloud has changed the way information technology is delivered to enterprises. Now, any company with a browser and an internet connection can access compute power, storage, and applications as needed. However, when it comes to enterprise development, even cloud development, companies are still using traditional resourcing models. The standardization and public APIs that cloud platforms provide make it possible to work differently. Since everyone is working on the same platforms with the same APIs, it’s possible for anyone to spec an application and tap into a global pool of developers to fulfill that request. Last year, Appirio launched CloudSpokes, a cloud-focused developer community with more than 37,000 developers available on demand to every enterprise. For example, a customer of ours wanted to build a mobile application to scan attendees at their events. Rather than trying to hire a team of mobile developers, they used CloudSpokes to build out an application in a matter of weeks for a total cost of <$10,000. CloudSpokes and communities like it enable CIOs with a chance to react quickly to changes in the business and test new ideas without building out a team for every potential need.

Ultimately, the CIO of the future focuses on users, customers and business outcomes, rather than on keeping the lights on. This is what IT departments have always aspired to, but now both the technology and the community are in place to enable this vision!

[Blog] The Vision of Next Generation IT: Learning from Facebook

Appirio — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 08:00:00 +0000

Sara Campbell

It’s a well-known story and global obsession--the startup founded in a Harvard University dorm room that quickly grew to become the world’s largest social networking site. The popularity, growth and momentum of Facebook’s business are unparalleled and so are the IT practices that enable more than 850 million active users to harness the power and unprecedented collaboration of Facebook.

Having worked with Facebook since early 2010, Appirio has had the pleasure of partnering with Facebook to reimagine what is possible with technology. Recently, we had the opportunity to sit down with key members of the Facebook team to understand what a “cloud first” mentality means for the IT team delivering business transformation at Facebook.

Facebook CIO Tim Campos shares his vision about the next generation of IT enabled by the cloud.

The Facebook team explains why they needed a partner to move as quickly as their business.

From a global ad sales application to a custom recruiting and HR application to a consigned materials app that manages data center inventory to make sure Facebook is “always up”, Facebook shares first hand how they partnered with Appirio to change the way they do business.

[Blog] Customer Spotlight - A Q&A with Karen Bintz, BMC Software

Appirio — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 08:00:00 +0000

By Sara Campbell

In 2011, BMC Software ranked among the top 20 largest software companies in the world. The company is credited with pioneering the business service management (BSM) concept as a way to help better align IT operations with business needs. Today, the company specializes in both mainframe and distributed technologies that serve multiple functions.

During more than three decades of growth and success, BMC has remained an innovator, always pushing the envelope on technology. The company’s forward-thinking translates into everything BMC does, including its world-renowned Executive Briefing Center (EBC). I recently sat down with Karen Bintz, director of customer experience at BMC to talk about the opportunities a recently developed mobile app has brought to the EBC.

Q: Set the stage. Tell me a little about BMC’s Executive Briefing Center?
A: We are very proud to have a world-class Executive Briefing Center and program that we use as a key strategy in the sales cycle to educate customers and prospects on BMC’s products and services. We hold about 300 briefings per year that range from custom briefings for individual companies, to our standard briefings targeted at multi-company audiences.

The EBC has proven itself to be an important revenue driver. In fact, approximately 85 percent of customers and prospects that visit the EBC purchase BMC solutions and the program itself touches about one of every five dollars of sales pipeline opportunity. Additionally, while the EBC is heralded internally as one of the best selling tools we have, we have also been recognized by the broader industry. In 2011, BMC’s EBC received the prestigious Briefing Program of the Year Award from the Association of Briefing Program Managers.

Q: It sounds like the EBC runs like a well-oiled machine, why make changes?
A: Last spring when we returned from the award ceremony, we were on cloud nine, but we knew we didn’t want to rest on our laurels. We needed to step up our game and take it to the next level. Debuting a mobile app was the obvious choice.

Q: How did you build the mobile app?
A: Once it was decided that we wanted to develop a mobile survey application for the EBC, we knew we had to partner with someone who had expertise in the area. The prior year, we successfully worked with Appirio to roll-out our Salesforce Sales Cloud implementation, and had built an excellent working relationship with their team. It turned out that they also had the mobile expertise we were looking for, making for an easy decision.

Appirio helped develop the survey app with their framework. The app front-ends our Salesforce.com CRM system and has seamless integration to Leads and Contacts. Additionally, real-time survey feedback is managed directly in Salesforce.com.

Briefing accommodations survey screen

Q: How has the app changed the way BMC does business through the EBC?
It’s been amazing! Now when our customers and prospects walk into our high-tech facility they see iPads at each station rather than a piece of paper and a pen. This sets the proper image of BMC as a technology innovator, right from the start. And while the wow factor is impressive, the functionality is even better.

Additionally, up until recently, I had a college intern who would spend 10+ hours each week entering the responses from the EBC surveys. It was time consuming, tedious and extremely inefficient. It required us to shuffle work schedules to make sure the survey data was input and compiled within our 24 hour service level agreement.

With the paper survey, most attendees would wait until the very end to complete it. Now, at the start of each briefing, our facilitator asks the attendees to sign-in and rate their confidence in BMC. Since we receive the data in real-time, we have critical information about the audience’s pre-confidence in BMC right from the start. Our presenters go in knowing who the advocates in the room are and who might need a little more attention. We are able to alter our focus on the spot to address the individuals in the room and directly influence their confidence in BMC. And then at the end of the briefing, when the attendees complete the remainder of the survey, and answer the final question about their current confidence in BMC, we have an accurate representation of how the six hours they spent with us affected their perception of BMC.

Q: What kinds of feedback have you received thus far?
A: Needless to say, it’s been extremely positive. We get compliments from customers all the time about the experience our EBC offers, and our sales reps are constantly vying to get their prospects and customers involved in the EBC. Approximately 81 percent of our sales representatives who make their annual quota send customers and prospects through the EBC, so it’s definitely a measure of success.

Q: What’s next for the EBC?
A: In this mobility phase, we are pulling information from our attendees. In the next phase, we hope to push information to our attendees. This would allow them to choose presentations, white papers and other collateral and materials from a pick list and then email it directly to themselves or their colleagues.

Q: What advice would you give to others who have Salesforce.com and are considering mobility?
A: I would first say, don’t reinvent the wheel. Partner with a vendor like Appirio who has strong expertise in both Salesforce and mobility. Also make sure, as we did, to have a strong internal project manager who has both the technical aptitude and awareness of the business impact. In fact, it’s a whole lot like BMC’ s Business Service Management strategy, you need to link IT projects to the needs and goals of the business in order to truly achieve success.

[Blog] One Small Step For the Cloud Industry, One Giant Leap for Appirio

Appirio — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 00:18:00 +0000

by Chris Barbin

This morning, Appirio announced that it has raised $60 million from global growth investor General Atlantic - more than 3x what we have previously raised as a company to date. Given our strong growth, ability to run a profitable services business and general market momentum, the natural question is why raise the capital? We couldn’t be more excited at all the things this will enable us to do right now, but, to answer fully, we must first take a step back.

We founded Appirio in 2006 because we thought our industry was broken. We had worked with and for systems integrators (SIs) and experienced first hand how they had engineered their entire business models around the complexity and shortfalls of on-premise technology. The combination of on-premise technology and traditional system integration was just not working. CIO survey after CIO survey highlighted the central issue of traditional IT - 80% of time and budget keeping the lights on and no time to align with the business. I saw this firsthand at Borland where when I became CIO, we had a company with 1,000 people and 1,000 servers.

As the cloud emerged, we saw a radically different future for technology in the enterprise. Enterprises now had the potential to move faster and capitalize on, and maybe even create disruptions in their industries. Yet, the services ecosystems hadn’t innovated in a decade and were wed to the practices and skills needed to make slow moving on-premise technology work.
We knew we needed to bring Silicon Valley thinking and innovation to the stagnant services model. In early 2007, we talked about “Services 2.0”, a new services model that could disrupt traditional consulting as radically as we believed the cloud would disrupt on-premise software..

Since then, we’ve been hard at work showing that Appirio can do it better. As we worked with over 300 enterprises and moved over 1.5 million users to the public cloud, we learned how to use technology and crowdsourcing to power our consulting services in ways that were never possible with on-premise software. We’ve been privileged to work with innovative companies of all sizes and mindsets, from large and established companies reinventing themselves for a new age like Japan Post to companies that are changing the world like Twitter. The constant across all these customers is a desire to change how they do business using technology.

Our agile delivery approach delivers results quickly, our technology portfolio helps us bring Appirio’s collective experience to every customer and the CloudSpokes community lets us bring the talents of tens of thousands of developers to every project. And of course the foundation of our success is the set of close partnerships with like-minded cloud leaders like salesforce.com, Workday, Google and Amazon.

Now, five and a half years later, what began as proof of concept is a vibrant and fast-growing global business with nearly 500 full time staff and operations in 3 continents. Both our customers and their ambitions have grown with us. We believe more than ever that we will disrupt the entire global systems integrator model - and General Atlantic does too. With their support, and with the public cloud growing in importance each day, Appirio will disrupt more and more of the worldwide IT industry. We’ll live up to the expectations of leading enterprises like Facebook that are showing us the future by re-imagining what’s possible with technology and demanding an alternative to global systems integrators.

With the investment we are also honored to welcome Gary Reiner to our board of directors. As the former CIO of GE for 14 years, Gary has shaped many IT leaders across today’s industry. GE and the network of executives it has graduated have the reputation of being pragmatic, cost conscious, ‘show me’ first executives who insist on clear and demonstrable value. Winning GA and Gary over gave us a no-nonsense filter to distill how we are and will continue to disrupt the IT value chain. His voice in helping ensure we continue to focus on the pragmatic, future needs of large enterprises will be a welcome addition.

Several months ago we were named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer because of our potential to help change the world through technology. Today, we are stepping up our commitment to deliver the same type of disruption that salesforce.com and Workday have delivered to SAP and Oracle to the traditional systems integrators. As Andy Warhol once said “They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” We are dedicated to driving that change and taking the success we have had with leading enterprises to more customers across the world and every aspect of the transition to cloud computing.

[Blog] Software eats the World: Are the Globals SIs Next?

Appirio — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 15:17:00 +0000

By Narinder Singh
@singhns

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”
– Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs’ commencement address at Stanford remains one of an entrepreneur's classic sources for inspiration - particularly the notion that time is limited and change is inevitable. What Jobs personalizes in death as the change agent for individual life, Joseph Schumpeter professed for companies and industries as “creative destruction” - the inevitability that innovation will disrupt the economic order of the day.

In Clayton Christen’s work on The Innovators Dilemma, Marc Benioff’s proclamations of how on-premise technology is dead, and Marc Andreesen’s piece in the Wall Street Journal on how software is disrupting every industry - we have leaders who demonstrate clearly how this has happened in the past. Yet in the moment, despite the lessons of history, the agents of change are too often dismissed because it’s just easier to believe the Goliaths of an industry will persist. It’s easier to believe in DEC, Kodak, Blockbuster, Barnes & Noble and Microsoft than it is to believe in upstarts we’ve never even heard of. Even when we acknowledge the initial disruption, as with cloud computing. The ultimate impact is far wider than most of us ever thought possible.

Cloud Computing: Catalyst for Structural Disruption
Less than ten years ago, many signs pointed to an enterprise software industry that looks like the auto industry, where a few major players control a stagnant set of competing ecosystems. SAP, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft appeared to only have serious competition from one another. Yet salesforce.com emerged from that stagnant market and shepherded in a new generation of innovative enteprise technology providers including Workday, Amazon and Google. These companies and others like them are capturing the hearts, minds and future wallets of the industry.

Cloud providers have shown two structural disruptions over their legacy predecessors. The first is a new level of speed to value. The cost advantages of the cloud were the initial spark, but the ability to get to value in weeks and months rather than years has created a firestorm of enthusiasm in the enterprise around potential impact. If technology-related programs can be executed this quickly, businesses can for the first time ever rely on technology to change current market dynamics. In the past, it was certain that by the time you were able to implement a significant on-premise technology, market conditions would be different, calling into question whether the problems you were solving were even the right ones.

The second structural disruption is more nuanced. It’s a change in the certainty of success and role of failure. In the past, technology projects were complicated initiatives that required everything to be just right. You could be 90% into an SAP rollout and still be uncertain whether or not it was on track and likely to succeed in achieving its goals. To mitigate against this, you structured everything around making sure every possible risk in a multi-year program had been considered and mitigated. Rolling out a new ERP was your equivalent of launching the space shuttle - you got one chance and it had to be right. Everything felt like it was, and actually was, wound too tight.

Cloud technology, for many of the reasons we’ve written about before, has created unparalleled flexibility for enterprises. By being able to show real users, business owners, and technologists progress as you go, you can evaluate, fail and fix almost daily. Users can see what they’re getting all along the way. Being agile has become more than a development trend, it actually represents how the business operates. This is the ultimate manifestation of the relative cost of finding an issue in development vs. testing vs. rollout. For even highly complicated projects, risk is now parceled into smaller pieces because you can spot and test failures at every point along the way. In addition, functional and technical managers no longer have to try to guess and prepare for all the different permutations of what might happen when they start a project. By the time you arrive at the first “go-live”, you already know what’s going to happen because it’s what you’ve been seeing for weeks or months. The ability to be agile and iterate frequently is one of the reason why cloud deployments have seen far higher success rates and far fewer high profile IT failures.

The CIO’s Guide to Making the Cloud Disruption Work For You
Marc Andreesen’s article that we referenced earlier - “Why Software is Eating the World” - describes how software has disrupted industry after industry. This view of software as a catalyst of disruption stands in stark contrast to an age of on-premise technology where leading academics and business leaders argued “Does IT Matter?”. Cloud technologies have changed where enterprise technology lies within these two extremes by radically altering speed to value and certainty of success. This has raised the stakes for more CIOs than ever before - will you lead your company to use technology in a way that directly impacts your competitiveness in the market, or will someone else disrupt your future?

Today, for companies to succeed with the cloud at scale, they need to take advantage of the cloud’s speed to value and agility to iteratively shape their processes and maximize business impact. CIOs who treat the cloud like an ERP initiative are certain to fall far short of translating cloud potential into true business impact. IT organizations must:

Demand Speed and Agility - Organize their own teams and trusted partners around a model that expects every initiative to start to create value in months.
Mitigate the Right Risks - Recognize that even for large-scale cloud initiatives, hierarchical, highly structured governance (PMOs upon PMOs) hamper rapid iteration and actually increase risk. What used to be fundamental to a successful voyage may today be anchoring you to the shore. Use cloud technologies to enable iteration and micro failures that will lead to macro level success.
Think Disruption - Move beyond the template for last year’s best practice. Yesterday's best practices are technology-centric and inward looking. Today's technologies enable you to focus your business outward - on your customers and your customers' customers. Start creating “new practices” that use today's technologies (mobile, social, cloud) to change the way you engage with your customers, partners, employees, investors and other stakeholders. Think innovation and disruption rather than regressing to the mean with the last generation’s best practices!

Cloud Eats the On-premise Ecosystem: A Broken Model and a Natural Extension
Cloud technologies have shown a potential that is well beyond previous paradigms of technology. Yet, for enterprises there are many steps between potential and actually driving transformative business impact. And it is in this transition, that lies the second order disruption of the cloud. You see, an entire systems integration industry has been built around how to help businesses consume and get value from technology. But the global systems integration model has been built around generations of limitations in technology that the cloud has removed in just the past few years. The very tools and techniques that enabled this model to deal with the challenges of SAP and Oracle ERP rollouts have created structural weaknesses in dealing with the cloud.

After the first World War, the French constructed the Maginot Line - a set of fortifications, tanks obstacles and other fixed positions to defend the country. It was “extolled as a work of genius” up until the point of World War II, when it became clear that armies were structurally more mobile and agile than ever before. The Maginot Line was essentially driven around and France was successfully invaded in just a few days. The global systems integrator model is the Maginot Line of the cloud world.

Most of us who have been in IT for long enough knew the on-premise application model was broken even before the cloud emerged. We felt the frustration of the business, protested a bit too vehemently at Nick Carr’s accusations that IT didn’t matter, and knew a big project had as much chance of being canceled as completed. Enthusiastic was seldom a word used to describe customers after a project.

Essentially, the same paragraph can be written to describe the state of the global systems integrator (GSI). Individuals and teams can be great, but most of us know that as firms they are mostly identical versions of one another. The scores of us who spent years inside them know that even on the best days they feel like great people trapped by a system created to minimize risk rather than environments that encourage dramatic innovation. And while Twitter is full of enthusiastic paens from customers to Salesforce, Google and Workday, I’ve yet to see close to the same enthusiasm from customers for their GSI partners.

So it’s no wonder that after disrupting on-premise technology directly, the cloud is now disrupting the ecosystems built around on-premise technology. After all, Accenture and Deloitte have as many or more Oracle and SAP developers than Oracle and SAP themselves. In addition, just like on-premise incumbents reacted slowly to the cloud, we see GSIs ‘embracing’ the change in small parts of their organizations while the antibodies within cling with every fiber to the older, more profitable model. Even further, just like in the early days of cloud when legacy providers were suggesting hybrid deployment models for SaaS applications (long since discredited), GSIs are not facing how significantly the industry has changed and are actually touting their long legacies in on-premise as an advantage !

One fundamental difference between the way the cloud disrupted on-premise technology and the current disruption to the GSI model is the level of dialog on the topic. As SaaS and the cloud took off, we saw fireworks between innovative leaders like Marc Benioff and those trying to hold onto the past. So far, we haven't seen close to the same level of dialog around the disruption of the GSI model. Partially this is a result of GSIs trying to attach themselves - no matter how awkwardly - to cloud leaders like salesforce.com, Google and Workday. Faced with already trying to change the very essence of the role of technology in business, cloud leaders have tried to use this embrace for validation “see even they get how big a change cloud is and are on board.”

But ultimately, cloud providers care most about how effectively their technology can be translated from potential to performance for their customers. While enterprises have relied historically on the GSI model to help with technology rollouts, it has only been in the context of IT as the lowest common denominator (Nick Carr’s IT Doesn’t Matter), never in the context of IT as a business disruptor (Andreesen’s model of using software to “eat the world”). The current GSI model is better suited to minimizing technology risk and getting to the lowest common denominator of results than for using technology to drive disruption. As the GSI model proves detrimental to driving disruption, the chasm between GSIs and cloud providers will widen. Finally, over time the economic conflict between GSIs and cloud providers will also become more pronounced. In a world without servers and software, GSIs will lose a substantive portion of the revenue they have taken for granted because it’s just part of the cloud service.

The cloud has shown the fundamental weaknesses in the on-premise centric model currently embraced by the GSIs. Now dozens of pure-play cloud providers are approaching cloud success with tools and techniques yet undiscovered by the GSIs. In fact, the vast majority of high profile public cloud successes across salesforce.com, Google and Workday haven’t even involved the GSIs. Perhaps most tellingly, Salesforce.com purchased a pure cloud provider last year, Model Metrics, to “lead the shift to the social enterprise” despite repeated statements from Accenture and Deloitte on how invested they are in driving social enterprise transformations.

Where to Go From Here
At Appirio, we are attempting to disrupt the global systems integrator because we witness first-hand the contrast between what can be accomplished with an “all cloud” mentality vs a legacy mindset. We believe the cloud-centric model is fundamentally better for customers. While it’s clear that Appirio the company is still a ways from instilling substantive fear into global systems integrators like Accenture and Deloitte, the cloud model we have helped drive is exploding.

Service providers who can drive enterprise success at scale with the cloud must deliver speed and agility, mitigate the right risks and enable customers to create disruptions. At Appirio, we use an agile-inspired approach along with technology built up over 1000s of enterprise cloud projects to deliver value faster and more predictably. By showing business users progress at every stage of our iterative development process, we can fail fast, make adjustments and reduce the real risks - low adoption, usage and impact. Finally, we help our customers think disruptively because that's who we are. Our business runs 100% in the cloud and has scaled and succeeded because of the very things we help customers do. We created a crowdsourced development community, CloudSpokes, because we constantly seek to disrupt our own business in order to deliver more value, more efficiently to our customers.

Ultimately GSIs are trapped by the Innovator’s Dilemma. Or stated through the lesson of the Maginot Line - “generals always fight the last war, especially if they have won it.” Now, CIOs and business leaders must prepare for tomorrow by choosing how they realign their own organizations, how they incorporate partners into their overall strategy, and who the right partners are. For the first time in a long time, cloud technology has made IT cool, relevant and strategic. Now, the only question is how your choices can lead your business to the right side of disruption.

[Blog] Customer Spotlight - Q&A with Gary Spears, Medtronic

Appirio — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 08:00:00 +0000

By Sara Campbell

We were proud to name Gary Spears, IT Director at Medtronic one of Appirio’s Cloud Pioneers in 2011. As a member of the Medtronic team since 2006, Gary has been the leading force behind Medtronic’s sales IT architecture overhaul.

Medtronic, the world’s largest medical technology company ranked among the Fortune 500, began working with Appirio to create a ‘hub and spokes’ like architecture with a single Salesforce master CRM system feeding multiple Salesforce instances at the individual business level. This created data consistency across the company and providing unparalleled opportunities for collaboration and dialogue between various business units and geographies.

I sat down with Gary to get his take on the business transformation taking place at Medtronic and what it means be named a Cloud Pioneer.

Q: Can you tell me a little about Medtronic’s business and the challenge you have addressed with Salesforce.com?

A: Medtronic is the largest medical device company in world and in recent years, we had noticed that growth in two of our major business areas had slowed dramatically. Additionally, our customer-base shifted from being primarily physicians to include hospital procurement departments and individual patients. For the first time, we recognized a need to raise brand awareness among all three constituents.

We needed to organically increase growth and revenue while being cognizant of the paradigm shift taking place in both the economy and the medical field. Salesforce Sales Cloud allowed us the flexibility to architect a platform that would unify data across the organization, providing greater visibility into all accounts and ultimately allowing us to organically grow our brand.

Q: How has “working in the cloud” changed the way Medtronic does business?

A: It’s changed a lot, but I think there are two things that stand out about working in the cloud. First, it has changed the way we think about data and how important it is to our business success. When you expose data the way we have, you open the kimono a little bit and you begin to realize that garbage in equals garbage out. So while we have gained transparency across all areas of our business we’ve also gained an appreciation for our data challenges, which we didn’t even know existed six months ago.

Second, as we continue to learn new things about our data, the beauty of working in the cloud is the speed and flexibility. The Medtronic sales team operates near the speed of light. Working in the cloud allows us to keep up with their furious pace and the platform allows us to maintain that pace and better satisfy the needs of our field teams than we were able to do in the past.

Q: What did it take to get from vision to execution?

A: Traditionally, Medtronic has been a very conservative organization--risk averse, hesitant to push the envelope--so with an undertaking like this, it didn’t hurt that I wasn’t opposed to getting a little beat up along the way. But in all seriousness, our leadership team recognized that we could do this the right way now or have to redo it at 3-4 times the expense a few years down the road. With our new CEO touting individual accountability throughout the organization, our IT vision aligned nicely with the corporate vision being driven both by the executive team and the needs of our individual geographies and business units. Getting buy-in from both the business unit and executive level allowed the IT team to drive the vision with both top-down and bottom-up support.

Q: What is it like working with Appirio?

A: Working with Appirio has been a very good experience for myself and the Medtronic team. The talented group of consultants they have dedicated to us has provided the thought leadership and expertise we need, since our internal team is small and new to this Salesforce architecture. The Appirio team has guided us through our challenges and provided access to other experts and executives within the organization when our needs called for it. In comparison with other vendors I have worked with, including some of the largest Global SIs, working with Appirio has been a very positive experience.

Q: What future plans does Medtronic have?

A: We’re absolutely driving toward a more social and mobile enterprise. Medtronic as a company is moving toward phone choice in the field across all different apps, including sales, HR, supply chain, etc. We want any employee to be able to walk into a mobile store, pick a device and access any of our business applications at the touch of a button.

On the social side of things, we have an individual completely dedicated to working on our social enterprise strategy. We already have four or five instances of Radian6 in place helping us monitor and listen to our customers and get a better sense of our brand awareness and presence. In terms of internal collaboration, I recently heard the phrase ‘if you don’t Chatter, you don’t matter’. It’s catchy and we agree that Chatter will likely have a significant impact internally, but right now we are trying to determine our strategy behind Chatter, how we comply with industry regulations and what the economic value will be to Medtronic in implementing Chatter. We know enough to recognize that we need a strategy behind our social enterprise efforts.

Q: You were named one of our 2011 Cloud Pioneers. What does being named a Cloud Pioneer mean to you?

A: It means that myself and Medtronic are going places we haven’t gone before. While we have always been extremely innovative in our R&D efforts--bringing trailblazing new treatments to patients--that has been our focus and we have been more neglectful of our own internal systems and processes. With this project, we are changing that through IT thought leadership within our own walls. I have spoken a lot to other suppliers and vendors in recent months and continually get the same reaction, ‘you’re doing what?’. They are amazed with our IT and business innovation and our ability to push boundaries. We’re definitely still figuring things out, but the beauty is that the platform and architecture we have chosen gives us the flexibility to make changes along the way and play with it until we get it right.

[Blog] UX - An Often Overlooked Key to Project Success

Appirio — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 08:00:00 +0000

By Mark Sullivan (@msulliv)

How do you define project success? Is it delivering a project on time and on budget? Is it delivering business results? Increasingly, IT departments are expected to do more than deliver the project to completion. With public cloud solutions, a lot of the technical complexity of IT projects has been eliminated and the focus has shifted to delivering business outcomes. So the question for IT projects teams now is how to successfully deliver business outcomes.

We find time and again that the key to achieving business outcomes is creating solutions that are broadly adopted and used. Adoption happens through a combination of strong organizational sponsorship and bottoms-up usage and grassroots growth. Pure top-down approaches only go so far and start to break down after a while. The key to broad and sustained adoption is to create functional and engaging solutions that help people do their jobs better. That’s why user experience (UX) is such a critical component of a successful project.

What is User Experience?
In the B2C context, experience design is a growing practice broadly applied to many situations. Apple stores are great examples of brand experience design and customer experience design.

In the IT context, the term “user experience” describes how well technology supports an end-user’s goals - goals that usually center around accomplishing a business process with support from a business application.

A common misconception is that UX is mostly focused on creating visually appealing applications. While visual appeal is important, good looks alone are not enough to ensure a compelling user experience. UX can cover the range of interactions with applications - from user interface design to training and change management. So a good UX comes from incorporating user centered design, interaction design, information architecture, usability, and graphic design to create an engaging, purposeful experience.

UX for Cloud Applications – Is it Necessary?
User experience is not a new concern for cloud vendors such as Salesforce.com. They have already expended considerable effort on the user experience of their applications, performing rigorous usability testing, providing extensive training materials, and making support available through multiple channels.

But Salesforce.com and other SaaS vendors cannot optimize their application for your users, in your industry, in your business context. That “last mile” of user experience is up to you and your team to optimize.

Fortunately, many of the leading SaaS tools such as Salesforce.com are deep enough that you have several options for improving the out-of-the-box UX, from simple configuration through extensive customization.

UX Framework for Cloud Applications
We usually think about three levels of effort in optimizing the user experience for cloud applications like Salesforce.com.

Although we’ve diagrammed these levels as a hierarchy, it is possible (and sometimes desirable) to support multiple levels simultaneously, or to skip levels, from level 1 to 3, for example.

Selecting a Target UX Level
Clearly UX design can add cost to a project above merely delivering the baseline functionality. How can you determine when and how much to invest in optimizing the UX so that the value in user adoption and usability outweighs the incremental cost?

Generally, you should take a cost/benefit approach to the question, factoring in considerations such as how many users are affected, how critical they are to achieving the organization’s goals, how frequently they perform an activity, how often the functional requirements change, and so forth. Then, for each group of users, such as in-house sales reps, you can decide which UX option best balances adoption and cost: Good, Better, or Best.

Getting Started
If you’re just getting started with a cloud project, this is the ideal time to think about how your new solution is going to make your users’ jobs easier.

The key steps are:

Involve your UX team early in the initial design process make sure you have UX specialists early on in your project to start off on the right foot
Define who your users are sounds obvious but many projects have failed because solutions were designed for project sponsors and not for the actual user
Understand what your users are trying to do
Figure out how much you want to optimize the user experience configure, customize or contextualize for each segment of users
Involve end users in your development process
Iterate, measure and refine

If you already have a cloud application rolled out, the steps are similar but you should start by picking a segment of the user population and a finite part of your application to optimize. Then you can apply the same steps and expand your design scope as you see results.

If you need help along the way, tweet us @appirio #ux!

Mark Sullivan is a Sr. Consultant at Appirio. He is a founding member of the User Experience practice at Appirio and has a background in information architecture, usability, user adoption and application development at a variety of high-tech enterprises.

[Blog] Happy first birthday to our crowd in the cloud

Appirio — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 06:00:00 +0000

By Narinder Singh

A first birthday is a milestone - it’s a time to celebrate and reflect on the year past, all while knowing that there is a lot to be accomplished in the years ahead. In older times and developing countries the first birthday is celebrated heavily simply because it was a key inflection point in mortality rates and meant the feasibility of life had been confirmed - it was finally time to dream about the future.

It’s been exactly one year since we launched CloudSpokes - the crowdsourcing community that matches companies who need cloud development work with a worldwide community of specialist developers - and what a year it has been.

Last year, we were full of anticipation and nerves - we knew as well as anyone that there is a need for an alternate approach to development for the enterprise cloud development market, but the model had yet to be proven. As a company, Appirio celebrates cloud pioneers, and we pride ourselves on being one, but this was definitely pushing the envelope.

After a year of being live, we’re thrilled at what CloudSpokes has achieved. The community has gone from zero to 32,000+ global developers, produced more than 150 applications and projects and paid out more than U.S. $300,000. Despite knowing how innovative crowdsourcing can be (we had incorporated crowdsourcing into our own work before last year) we were stunned to see what the community began producing in a short amount of time and the amount of interest from other companies to get involved.

During the past year, CloudSpokes turned out some phenomenal applications in a short amount of time. Among our favorites are:

Dreamforce party app: Helpes conference attendees keep track of social events and organize their calendar.
Commute calculator: Helps companies determine the best location for new offices.
Automated home security system: An alarm system that texts the home owner when the system detects an intruder.

We’ve also had the opportunity to meet a ton of cool people. CloudSpokes hosted U.S.-based hackathons for Dreamforce, Docusign E-Sign Hackathon, Angelhack and the Box.net mobile challenge. The CloudSpokes team was excited to see some of our own community members at a few of these events and hear their personal stories of how they’ve used contest winnings. We’re always happy to hear that we’re liked by our developers.

Coming off of a banner year for the community is humbling and exciting at the same time. We’re over the moon with what the community has achieved, but it’s just getting started -more contests, more ways to win money faster, more technologies, more innovation and more surprises! Thank you to everyone that’s been involved with the community’s success this year - here’s to many more birthdays.

[Blog] Don’t Bring Your Junk Drawer to the Cloud

Appirio — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 08:00:00 +0000

By Nick Hamm (@hammnick) and Balakrishna Narasimhan (@bnara75)

A question we often hear from enterprises that are considering cloud applications or platforms like Salesforce, Google Apps, or Workday is, “Have you ever migrated from System X?” This is a natural question, and we understand why people ask it.

But if you think about migrating away from a legacy application like moving out of an old house, this would be like only asking your moving company, “Have you ever moved anyone out of a brownstone with a basement?” You may have asked about logistics but you probably spent a lot more time checking references, doing background checks, and ensuring that the company was adequately experienced in moving and had maintained a good reputation.

It is all too common to look at migration from a legacy application to the cloud as pure technical gymnastics. We’ve helped hundreds of enterprises migrate from every legacy platform imaginable including Siebel, SAP, Oracle, Outlook, Lotus Notes and even Rolodexes! What we’ve learned is that migrating to a cloud application is about a lot more than migrating your application logic “as is” from your servers to someone else’s. Cloud applications and platforms are much more flexible and easier to work with than traditional applications and bring enterprises new possibilities that were simply unavailable with traditional systems. With traditional applications, you had to spend so much time thinking about the infrastructure and the data that the things most important to user adoption (ease of use, user experience) were an afterthought.

With cloud applications and platforms, since a lot of the headaches of the past are gone, you can focus on thinking about your application from the perspective of those who are actually going to use it. Adoption, usage and business impact are what ultimately determine the success of your application. As you migrate to the cloud, you have the opportunity to focus on the things that improve your business rather than replicating every feature and data field from a legacy application that is going by the wayside. But how?

1. Define the Goals of Your Migration
It’s critical to start by defining the goals you want to achieve with your new application. Again, there may be a tendency to think of goals in very limited terms, e.g., IT operating expense, capital savings or hitting a specific deadline. But what we mean here is defining the business goals of your migration. What does your company hope to achieve by implementing a new application? What business goals and metrics do you want to impact? Often, enterprises embark on IT projects with a pure focus on technical and financial goals without defining business impact goals. This is a missed opportunity. A cloud migration is an ideal opportunity to engage with business stakeholders and determine how your project could address broader business priorities.

2. Understand the Business Process and Users Impacted by Your Application
Implementing a new app or platform is the perfect opportunity to revisit your business processes and enhance those that are working well and rethink or eliminate those that are not. Interview project sponsors, management, and end-users to gather many perspectives on what each group values as its priorities. Unlike a traditional process re-engineering effort, the idea is to quickly gather input on priorities and what’s working/not working, followed by prototyping the new process. The rapid prototyping capabilities available by adopting cloud platforms is one of the hidden benefits that you won’t find on any data sheet. Take full advantage of this capability and it will lead to a pragmatic and actionable blueprint of the new process and how it could work in your new application.

3. Iteratively Build Your New Business Process in the Cloud
Once the business process blueprint has been defined, the team should turn their focus on how they can make those processes as automated and easy to follow as possible. After all, a great business process on paper is useless if it is complicated for the user to follow. In this part of the project it is important to prototype, iterate, user test, and repeat. No matter how smart you are, your end users will always be smarter when it comes to how they want to work, and it will be invaluable to get their buy-in before expecting widespread adoption. Bottoms-up adoption can be more valuable than top-down (mandated) adoption, and this also promotes an open channel for ongoing feedback which will be critical for your application’s roadmap and continued relevance.

4. Transform and Migrate Your Legacy Data
So you noticed that we haven’t talked about your legacy application in a while. Well, that’s the point. We don’t want that legacy baggage cluttering up your shiny new application. But we do need the data, so this is where we have to go back, extract the data, and start mapping and transforming it to your new model. We didn’t let the old model dictate the new model, and that is critical. This move is your opportunity to clean out and reorganize all of those junk drawers and boxes in the back of the closet. It’s easier to think, “I’ll just throw all of this stuff in a box and reorganize everything once it’s at the new house”, but most of us know how that story ends - with the same boxes of clutter in the back of a different closet at the new house. It’s more work, and sometimes more complex, to transform a legacy data model and data into a completely new system, but you’ll feel better about not having any old skeletons in your new closets, we promise.

Conclusion: Build for the future, not the past
The overarching message here is that no matter which legacy application you want to retire on your road to the cloud, the process you follow should be the same. Our experience over hundreds of implementations of cloud applications like Salesforce, Google Apps, or Workday has shown that today’s migrations don’t carry the same technical concerns that you had to worry about with old on-premise apps, allowing you to focus on the user and process instead of the technology. So don’t let your old technology weigh you down - build for where you want to go tomorrow, not for where you were yesterday.

Nick Hamm is a Sr. Solutions Architect at Appirio and Salesforce MVP. He has helped over 200 companies across a wide variety of industries transform the way they do business by implementing cloud solutions. nhamm@appirio.com, @hammnick

[Blog] From the Earth to the Clouds to the Moon

Appirio — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:30:00 +0000

By Rob Cheng

Noted academic and writer Vivek Wadhwa has never shied away from controversy. He’s taken on hot-button topics of immigration and discrimination in the tech industry, and once called on entrepreneurs to rescue California. Last week, Wadhwa again challenged conventional wisdom by looking past the late-night punchlines about Newt Gingrich’s Moon Base and examining the core of his proposal, which is the role of competition in innovation.

Wadhwa writes in the Washington Post that such competitions are already making space flight more efficient, citing the 26 teams competing for a $30 million Google Lunar X-Prize reward, which is “causing entrepreneurs to develop creative new ways to attain spaceflight at a fraction of the normal cost.” He also points out that the long-standing $25,000 Orteig Prize helped spur innovations in aviation that enabled Charles Lindbergh to fly non-stop from New York to Paris in 1927.

A 2011 Harvard Business School study found that innovation competitions “fuel research and development that typically exceeds the value of the prize itself,” a finding that we have reproduced with our CloudSpokes community. Here are just a few examples of the creative solutions that even modest contest prizes have generated for our partners and clients:

A $2,000 prize resulted in this geolocation-based account checkin iPad app to help sales reps in the field keep track of customer visits
A $1,500 prize led to an employee commute calculator to help companies determine the best (and more environmentally friendly) location for new offices
A $750 prize resulted in this Chatter social influence app to help social enterprises track and reward employee collaboration
A $700 prize allowed users to “jailbreak” their Chatter user profile page to display custom content
A $500 prize led to the creation of an automated home security system, complete with motion detection, video capture, and SMS alerts

While these contests are cost effective (clients have estimated they would spend at least 2-3 times as much even using offshore resources), cost is not the biggest benefit. Submissions come from members who are enthusiastic about the technologies involved and who are competing with their peers for prizes and recognition, and this intrinsic motivation brings out the best in developers. In some cases, such as the “Chatter Jailbreak” app mentioned above, the community has come up with solutions that we would have never known were possible otherwise.

Just like the Orteig Prize helped draw people and resources into the burgeoning aviation industry, CloudSpokes has already attracted 30,000+ developers to help build the next generation of cloud computing solutions. Think of them as a multi-tenant pool of shared development resources, with top expertise in every technology, programming language, and platform, that you can tap into on-demand. And while there’s an obvious need for small businesses to complement limited in-house resources, the proliferation of cloud platforms means it’s no longer feasible for even large enterprises to internally staff for all needed skills, particularly when the demand for a particular technology or APIs is elastic (for example, Ruby-based social marketing apps that run on Heroku twice a year to support big seasonal retail campaigns).

In his Washington Post piece, Wadhwa advocates that NASA earmark 10% of its budget for innovation prizes. If 10% of NASA’s budget can spur breakthroughs in space travel and colonization, imagine the kind of innovation that a few percent of your organization’s IT budget could generate for your business!

Rob Cheng is Head of CloudSpokes Strategy at Appirio. His background includes product management, product marketing, and developer evangelism roles at Salesforce.com, CollabNet, Borland, Oracle and the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I). @robcheng

[Blog] The Growing Importance of User Experience in the Enterprise

Appirio — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:00:00 +0000

By Kevin Dodson

There has been a paradigm shift happening in enterprises across all industries. The traditional “bottoms up” approach that enterprise IT has taken in implementing new technology solutions is on its way out. Until recently, the decisions of an IT department became what was available to employees, and it was likely the best available in the marketplace. Many of us fondly remember driving home to show our kids the cool new Blackberry we received from work. Well, those days are gone.

Now, the best technology is most likely at home and your kids are showing you how to use it. You are now driving to work and telling your IT staff that you want to use your new iPad, iPhone or Android device. This “top down” approach to implementing new technology solutions in the enterprise is often referenced as the consumerization of the enterprise.

At the core of this consumerization of the enterprise revolution is user experience - you’re asking to use your iPad at work because it’s easy to use. The only reason you use the systems at work is because your job depends on it. If you weren’t forced to execute expense reports with scanners, scissors and tape, and instead could execute it faster with an iPhone app, you would likely spend a little more time doing your job. And you might even enter information into your CRM system more frequently if you could do it from your iPad.

A rich user experience is no longer an option when it comes to implementing any new technology solution within your enterprise and here are the reasons why....

1. Increase User Satisfaction - How many times have you heard, “our sales team, managers [insert group here] is not using a new system because it’s not easy to use,” or “the users hate using the application because it’s hard to do anything with it”? The more time you spend at the beginning of a project making sure there is a rich user experience, the more user satisfaction will increase.

2. Increase User Adoption - I come from the consumer market, building desktop and mobile applications for anyone who would buy it. Our highest levels of adoption were realized when people opted-in to use our solution. This is also true for the enterprise - people will use an application more often if they like the experience, regardless of how much pressure their employer puts on them to use it. Focusing on a consumer-like user experience, even for enterprise applications, can dramatically increase user adoption.

3. Lower Training Costs - If someone finds an application valuable and easy to use, they will likely make use of it often. It’s safe to bet that many people use their personal tablet or phone more often that their company’s CRM system (if the two aren’t interchangeable). At Appirio, we’ve found that companies with successful implementations spend roughly 25% of their implementation costs on delivering user adoption (training, communications, change management). Larger implementations can spend spend roughly 30-35 percent on user adoption. Spending time at the beginning of a project on the user experience can lower these costs. No one trained you to use Google, Craigslist or CNN.com. Think about it.

4. Increase in Productivity - Do not let technology get in the way of the user. A salesperson, physician, investment advisor, or whatever the role, does not want technology to slow them down. Making applications unique to the user’s job will increase productivity as well as their effectiveness.

5. Decrease in Support Cost - Prior to coming to Appirio, I worked on a project within the healthcare industry that boasted significantly lower support costs due to a user-focused solution. We selected iOS as the core operating system and built role-based applications within salesforce.com for the organization. As a result, the savings from the lower support costs more than paid for the entire new adoption of iOS and user-focused application.

The Consumerization of the Enterprise is happening and it brings great value to an organization. Focus on your user first and you will have more successful project launches in your future. What other benefits have you seen from a keener focus on the user experience when it comes to enterprise apps? Looking forward to your responses below.

Kevin Dodson helps lead the mobile practice at Appirio. He enjoys evaluating and managing new initiatives and brings extensive UI experience in the health care and high tech industries. kdodson@appirio.com

[Blog] Lessons from the World Economic Forum in Davos - Cloud Computing’s Global Impact

Appirio — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:27:00 +0000

By Chris Barbin

Last week I had the honor to attend my first World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos as a representative of 2012’s class of WEF Technology Pioneers. I made my first trip to Switzerland twenty years ago when I was traversing across Europe on a Eurorail Pass armed only with a backpack and $1,500 for the duration. That visit to Switzerland and Europe changed my perspective on life forever by completely opening up the world to me. While the lodging and food were a bit better last week, my Davos experience opened up another chapter for me and an even broader personal perspective. This time not just a global awareness, but how cloud computing (and hopefully young companies like Appirio) can really make a difference and a global impact in the coming decades.

The conversations in Davos were far reaching, from gender equality to social unrest to (of course) today’s economic challenges, and it was amazing to hear how often technology was brought up in these topics. As Nick Bilton from the New York Times said in his recent blog, “Even the 102-page program guide made more references to technology and social media than any of the nerdiest Silicon Valley blogs I read daily.”

However, what I found even more surprising was how little true understanding there was around cloud computing. Granted, its still only 4-5% of a $1.5T IT industry, and as CEO of a cloud computing company, I eat, sleep, and breathe that world. However, it was surprising at a time when CEOs, reporters and investors alike are talking about how “the cloud” will transform IT and even create jobs. I had a number of conversations in Davos with business executives who were already using or exploring cloud computing, but even they were still thinking about it from the private cloud perspective as a way to streamline costs - not a way to do things differently.

The shift to Internet-centric, public cloud technologies has the potential to not only reshape a new generation of industry giants (including Facebook, whose COO Sheryl Sandberg was co-chair and one of the hottest tickets in town), it’s one of the “new models” that will impact the world’s economy in the future which was a major theme of the conference.

Here are two more areas where I think cloud computing could make a huge global impact:

The crowd’s ability to stimulate a new workforce (and economies).
While cloud computing was less understood, crowdsourcing was a significant topic of discussion. One of my favorite conversations was with the founder and CEO of the Hult Global Case Challenge - a crowdsourcing platform and event that brings together students from around the globe to solve complex social issues. The cloud is enabling this move to crowdsourcing ideas.

I was also lucky enough to participate in a brainstorming session with Italy’s Minister of Economic Development, Corrado Passera, on bringing technology and innovation to Italy. With 6 million businesses in the country and 15-24 year olds there facing a 30% unemployment rate, he was looking for creative, disruptive concepts to help stimulate the economy. We talked about using platforms like our CloudSpokes crowdsourcing development community as an on-ramp for jobs and new skill development. It was an idea that intrigued Mr. Passera enough to ask us to stay in touch as part of a technology-working group to stimulate innovation in his country, and made me realize the impact that can be had when you combine the power of the cloud AND crowd.

The Millenial’s ability to solve problems in new and innovative ways.
This year the WEF introduced a new program called The Global Shapers, which includes a group of nearly 100 twenty-to-thirty year olds that have an entrepreneurial track record and are contributing to serving society at large. This is a generation that grew up living “in the cloud”. They tweet rather than email. They live on their phones not their computers. They established organizations like DropBox that serve 50 million people without building out huge workforces like in days past.

I won’t lie. Listening to these edgy and fearless leaders speak at times made me feel like the skeptical and pragmatic old guy, but they are incredibly strong, outspoken and have a unique perspective on the world. They will be able to apply the Internet, social technologies and networked cloud systems in ways that we haven’t even imagined yet. You only have to look at the Arab Spring to get a glimpse of what’s possible.

Sure, there are a lot of open questions around the cloud’s impact on the global economy - many of which came up in my one-on-one discussions. Things like what role government regulation will (and should) play in helping or hindering cloud adoption. Or where the cloud fits within the various security models across the world. Or how local infrastructure and business environments in emerging nations can adapt and mature to support this new way of doing business.

But that’s part of what excites me about this space - it’s still early and we’re still pioneering. There is no question that in our $1.5T industry, there are hundreds of billions of dollars of waste annually - failed projects, under-utilized hardware and software, corporate data centers draining excessive power, and bloated maintenance and services contracts required to make it all work together. As one C-level tech executive said during one of my industry roundtables “if we don’t innovate with things like the cloud and new business models, we’ll be faced with a crisis similar to what the financial services industry has been through.” I know personally, I’ll fight incredibly hard with industry partners, governments and forums like the WEF to prevent that from happening.

Davos and the World Economic Forum exceeded all my expectations and I could not be more thankful and feel more fortunate to have been able to attend on behalf of the team at Appirio.

[Blog] 10 Ways to Drive Cloud Adoption: Focus on the User (Part 2)

Appirio — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:54:00 +0000

Beth Chmielowski

My last post described five steps you can take during the strategy and planning phase of a cloud implementation to inform and simplify user adoption. Today’s post is all about the user and the top five ways to prepare and enable them for success.

Show Them: People who purchase and/or configure the tool are usually a very small subset of those that will use it. These people invest so much time getting the system ready for go live, that they sometimes forget that the majority of the company doesn’t know what is coming. They may not even know anything is coming, or if they do, they may be very nervous about it. Don’t wait for go live. Give people a sneak preview. Think about this as an internal marketing campaign, communicating both the vision as well as the reality today. There are many communications best practices – but if you do nothing else, at least schedule a demo.

Teach Them: Put together a training plan by audience. There will be multiple stakeholder groups which will have some shared and some unique needs based on how they will be using the new system. Make sure you teach them how to use the new tool within the context of the current or evolving processes they support. A demo helps set expectations, but training is crucial for actual usage. Ideally, training should be a blend of formal training that is hands-on, scenario-base and process-focused (vs. feature/function focused), augmented with agile and social learning options. The laundry list of everything a tool is capable of doing is largely irrelevant to any given user. Instead, teach them what the tool enables them to do in their role, and how they will be expected to use it.

Help Them: Help and support have an increasing number of meanings in the technology world.

Help them help themselves (Agile Learning): Provide access to content when people need it in an easy to consume way so it doesn’t disrupt them from the flow of work. Ideally, make that information available from within the context of where they will need it and build it around specific processes. Online help is great for describing buttons and tabs; agile learning content should describe tasks, and those tasks should be specific to the person, the company and the happy path that has been configured for them, not just generic, out of the box flows.
Help them connect with peers and experts so they can help each other (Social Learning): There will be people that will, whether by nature or by design, become evangelists for the system or experts with the processes that the system supports. Help people find each other and work together via collaboration and social learning tools. They are increasingly being built into or integrated with enterprise systems, so think though how you want to take advantage of those tools.
Help them when they’re stuck (IT Support): Make sure people know who to contact for help when they’re stuck, and how. Make sure people are available to provide that help, especially around go live. Also, have periodic checkpoints to review the most common issues and see if there’s anything that can be done within the technology itself to eliminate the problem.

Convince Them: If you’re expecting people to use the new system as part of their job, use it as part of your job. Management should set the example with their own behavior and drive people to the system whenever possible. For example, if you are using a new CRM system, run your sales calls from the tool. If sales reps are calling numbers that are different from what they’re tracking in the system, hold them accountable. If managers and leadership continually place value on the system and the data, users will be compelled to do so as well.

Empower Them: Finally, give users a mechanism for suggesting improvements. One of the many benefits we hear from line of business owners is that cloud-based technology gives them greater control over their own systems, rather than being dependant on IT for updates and releases. Not to imply that IT people are a barrier, however it’s not unusual for them to be an overworked team with a large backlog doing their best to balance multiple priorities. Cloud-based systems let them divest of some of the more tactical and ostensibly lower-value tasks such as tweaking fields or workflows by giving the maintenance back to the line of business. This is a win-win, since those minor tweaks may actually result in major wins in terms of adoption. And, given the ease of maintenance the Cloud offers, the line of business is able to prioritize and execute on those changes rather quickly. Take advantage of that. Think about the ongoing management and maintenance model you want to offer. Provide a way for users to submit requests, and provide input and suggestions. Define the governance model you will need to process and approve requests, and plan for an internal and/or external maintenance team that can execute on those changes.

You don’t need to do all of the items on this list, or the five steps mentioned in my previous post, to be successful. However the more you do, the greater your likelihood for success. At the end of the day any enterprise system implementation, whether cloud-based or not, represents a significant investment. You don’t want to get 6 or 12 months in and end up with a system that no one is using. Put some thought up front into what you will do to drive adoption, and weave those efforts throughout the life-cycle of your deployment.

Beth Chmielowski helps lead the user adoption and cloud training practice at Appirio. She has more than 14 years experience in the high tech industry defining and building programs that increase customer success. bethc@appirio.com, @bethchm

[Blog] 10 Ways to Drive Cloud Adoption: It’s Not Just Training (Part 1)

Appirio — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:27:00 +0000

Beth Chmielowski

Cloud technologies can simplify your life - from infrastructure set up to overall maintenance. In fact, SaaS applications can be so easy to implement and use, it’s easy to underestimate what it takes to get the breadth and depth of user adoption that defines a successful implementation. As cloud technologies mature and take greater hold throughout organizations, our cloud experts get a lot of questions from customers and prospects on how to make their investments take hold.

To help answer this, we put together a list of 10 things you can do to drive user adoption of cloud technology. Here are the first five in this two-part blog series.

Paint the Vision, the Roadmap, and the Realm of Possibilities: Often with enterprise systems, getting it right can take time. There are likely a bunch of other systems that need to play nicely, there may be significant process changes introduced, and in some cases it may feel like you have to take a step backwards before you can take two steps forward. People will be forgiving of growing pains if they believe there is a brighter future on the horizon, which means you have to communicate a vision, a roadmap and what’s possible in the long-run.

Vision : Describe what the end state looks like and why it matters to the company, to an organization, and to the user. Being realistic about what’s possible (or not possible) and how we’ll get there makes it easier for people to get on board. Convince the actual users why this choice and investment is the right one.
Roadmap: Define what the journey to that end state looks like, and the expected stops along the way (phases and releases). Because an enterprise system typically touches multiple organizations and roles, there may be multiple goals that need to be prioritized or conflicting expectations that need to be balanced. The first go live may feel less robust than the legacy system, but if users know it’s just a foundation and that capabilities will improve over future releases, they will be more tolerant.
Possibilities: Set the expectation that nothing is set in stone. Vision, timing and priorities are important but you should also be clear that these may change. The amazing thing about cloud-based systems is that new things are possible all the time. The horizon that you may have set your sights on initially suddenly becomes even more expansive than you could have imagined. That’s the true ROI of the cloud: it enables business innovation and boldness.

Configure for Results First, Then Process: You bought the system for a reason. What is it? What are the business goals that justified the investment in the first place and how will you know if you have achieved them? Understanding what data you need to get out of a system to inform business decisions and measure business results may take time, but it can have a profound impact on the configuration, and subsequently on the adoption of the technology. For example, when configuring a sales process in a CRM tool, it’s not just about replicating business as usual in the new interface or even streamlining the process based on the new tool’s capabilities. It is about defining the desired outcome and what sales metrics matter (such as pipeline by stage, accounts converted from prospect to customer, etc), and ensuring the data that informs these metrics gets captured in the process. Always start with the output the business hopes to achieve and transform existing data and process to meet the objectives. That is, define the level of detail you need to get to, ensure the data is collected, and make the process as easy as possible for the users.

Provide a Stellar User Experience: No one had to convince me or train me to use my iPhone; I can’t keep my hands off it. While I know my iPhone is a personal tool and a significantly different use case from an enterprise system that requires consistent usage across multiple contributors, it helps make my point. Once you are clear what you need and want people to do with a new system, there is really no excuse for not making it as easy and as pleasant an experience as possible to do it. The more you elevate the user experience, the more you lower the urgency and required effort for everything else on this list.

Ensure Executive Branding: Executive branding is more than just executive sponsorship. Sponsorship is about signing checks and providing sign-off. Branding is about advocating for change and jump starting it with the cache of a business leader. I have a lot of respect for my leadership team, and if any one of them stood up at a company meeting to introduce something new and ask me to accept it as a strategic priority, I would be predisposed to get on board. Even if it added work to my plate or introduced a state of ambiguity for a while, I would give it the benefit of the doubt and make some allowances for false starts because someone I respect asked me to.

Balance Obligation with Reason and Buy-In: Obligation means there is limited choice in the matter. We are obliged to follow the speed limit. We are obliged to deal with increased security at airports. However, obligation is more powerful when it is not just mandated, but when you comprehend the need for it. For example, Sept 11 was a compelling reason to tolerate increased airport security. But sometimes that’s not enough. Seeing the need for something may compel me to do it, but it won’t make me happy about it. Buy-in, on the other hand, leads me to want to do it. Getting people to want to do something is largely a factor of the user experience and executive branding delivered in conjunction with a comprehensive understanding of and belief in the vision, roadmap, and possibilities described above.

These are the first five ways that companies can increase the adoption of their cloud investments, and are all critical to consider in the planning and strategy phase of a new implementation. But don’t forget that adoption ultimately comes down to the people that have to use the system. In the next blog in this series, I’ll cover how you can focus on the “user” in user adoption.

Beth Chmielowski helps lead the user adoption and cloud training practice at Appirio. She has more than 14 years experience in the high tech industry defining and building programs that increase customer success. bethc@appirio.com , @bethchm

[Blog] Can Do Canines wins Extreme Cloud Makeover -- Nonprofit Edition

Appirio — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 06:00:00 +0000

By Mark Koenig

Last year we challenged nonprofits to submit for the “Extreme Cloud Makeover-- Nonprofit Edition.” The idea was to provide the staff of one deserving nonprofit with a flexible, effective, cloud-based system that users love. We offered to extend an existing salesforce.com implementation, “extreme makeover” style, using the muscle of multiple Appirians and the power of technology we have developed through hundreds of customer engagements and the CloudSpokes community.

We received more than two dozen heart-felt entries and narrowed them down to three finalists. Then we asked our employees to choose the winner. Apparently our team has a soft spot for man’s best friend, because they voted Can Do Canines the first Extreme Cloud Makeover winner.

As their name suggests, Can Do Canines is dedicated to enhancing the quality of life for people with disabilities by creating mutually beneficial partnerships with specially trained dogs. Their canine companions are trained to assist their clients who have disabilities including mobility, hearing, diabetes, seizures, and autism. The dogs and all necessary training are provided free of charge to those in need.

Today, Can Do Canines relies on FileMaker Pro 5.5 as their main database to store and track information about clients, dogs, donors, volunteers, and vendors. And, like many organizations, they also tracked related information using spreadsheets. Having dramatically outgrown their database and spreadsheet tracking capabilities, they needed a new system that would enable them to stop putting effort into keeping all that data up to date an in sync and instead on training the dogs and matching them with people in need.

For the last few weeks, starting just before the holidays, the Appirio team has been hard at work with the Can Do Canines team, designing and building this new cloud-based system from the ground up. Today, we are on the ground conducting training with the users on their new system. The new system enables Can Do Canines to eliminate the once onerous process of tracking canine medical and training records, client applications, training documents and proper forms. And it moves them to a state-of-the-art technology foundation that affords them the opportunity to steward this information with much more confidence that indeed it will remain safe and secure.

The cloud-based solution is built on salesforce.com using the nonprofit starter pack (NPSP). Additionally, we are using components from the Appirio Cloud Asset Library, as well as CloudWorks, to make it easy for the Can Do Canines team to make the most out of the capabilities of Salesforce to capture and share information about its constituents. In an effort to truly match Can Do Canines needs with appropriate technology solutions, we reached out to Conga (AppExtremes Inc.) - the most popular document generation and reporting solutions for Salesforce - who graciously donated three licenses for three years.

We’re excited to be doing training this week and hope the staff enjoys their move to the cloud. I’m anxious to share how the “silver lining” of cloud computing is helping Can Do Canines achieve results and will share how the new cloud-based system is improving how the organization runs in the next few months. In the meantime, feel free to follow the project on the Silver Lining Facebook page.

[Blog] Three Ingredients for Improving Open Innovation

Appirio — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:10:00 +0000

By Dave Messinger

Last week, Saugatuck Research published an interesting report, “Mapping, Planning, and Benefiting from Global IT Innovation", recommending that enterprise R&D groups "broaden their 'innovation portfolios' by establishing or expanding innovation investment in areas and locations where innovation is growing - and being rewarded". Looking outside your own company walls might not sound like a new idea, but the following prediction from Saugatuck’s report provides some urgency to take action on the idea.

“By YE2016, the shift by enterprises toward new IT being acquired as Cloud-based, IT-as-a-service will accelerate a shift by most IT providers away from technological innovation as a core value, and toward innovation in technology use, application, and management as a core value.”

The report talks quite a bit about the rise of developing countries, and why innovation centers are increasingly moving outside the United States and Europe. Having a worldwide talent base is critically important, but how we tap into that base, source ideas and enable innovation in our processes makes just as big of a difference. One of my favorite TED talks is Steven Johnson's"Where Good Ideas Come From" where he describes the power of coffee houses in the 1600s and how new environments like that led to combining ideas and new levels of innovation.

It’s not too different from how we source ideas in our personal lives. Over the holidays I attempt to cook for our family gatherings, which in my case, means relying on recipes from sites like AllRecipes. Here I can find recipes and comments crowdsourced from people around the world.

Now I know there is no such thing as the perfect recipe to tap new markets and open innovation, but below are a few key ingredients.

Collect ideas from both external and internal sources. As Johnson’s TED talk explains, coffee houses led to a great flowering of ideas because it brought together people from all walks of life. At Appirio we use Salesforce’s Ideas platform to track and promote ideas from across the company. It gives anyone in the company the opportunity to directly affect how the company is run. At our regular all-hands meetings we provide an Ideas update on the highest rated ideas, implementation status and a leaderboard for contributors. Companies like Starbucks and Dell use Ideas to source ideas not just inside their company, but from millions of customers worldwide. This isn't too different, then my attempts to cook a holiday turkey. I found more than 200 recipes on how to cook a turkey. The recipe I ultimately used had over 30,000 votes, but the top comment that tweaked the recipe had almost 10,000 votes. Their input resulted (hopefully) in a much tastier meal!
Provide the opportunity for people to contribute and add to your own ideas. As we build and deploy technology in our organizations, consider the importance of providing an open API or building on public cloud infrastructure as a way to extend the innovation around your existing investments. A great example is how Wolfram|Alpha incorporated the Best Buy Remix API into their search engine just in time for the holidays. This made it possible for any iPhone 4S user to use Apple's Siri to search for electronics powered by Best Buy. Only companies willing to invest in creating open APIs or building on public cloud infrastructures will be able to cost effectively leverage external third parties to enrich and build on their investments.
Invest in a community to implement and improve on ideas. This is one of the toughest things for companies to do well, and one reason why Appirio invested in building CloudSpokes as a neutral community for crowdsourcing worldwide development talent. We’ve built the community to more than 30,000 developers worldwide and use it to supplement our own cloud-focused services, but also see the value in keeping it open to any company who needs to tap into a passionate cloud and mobile focused developer community. The care and feeding of the community is extremely important. You need to reward and recognize their ideas and contributions, whether that’s through monetary rewards, member recommendations, gamification elements like badges or providing access to new ideas and systems that excite them.

Whether you use CloudSpokes or a different community, make sure it’s filled with people with various perspectives - from different regions, different backgrounds, different levels of expertise. As Jeff Howe mentions in his book Crowdsourcing, never has there been a time where people trust experts less and amateurs more. These days politicians rank just above used cars salesmen in terms of trust, and crowdsourcing provides an economic means to capitalize on the intellectual capital of the amateur class.

There’s no question that the most successful companies in the future will be those that can effectively leverage open innovation and worldwide talent. Open idea exchanges, cloud platforms (which are already innovating at great speeds) and open APIs combined with crowdsourcing communities can be a great starting point. Now if I could only crowdsource my cooking skills, my life and my family’s would be so much better!

[Blog] Announcing our newest Cloud Pioneer - A Q&A with Vala Afshar & Dan Petlon, Enterasys

Appirio — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 09:15:00 +0000

By Sara Campbell

Congrats to our friends at Enterasys! Vala Afshar, Chief Customer Officer and Dan Petlon, Chief Information Officer, are the latest Appirio customers to receive our Cloud Pioneer award. Vala and Dan are quite the dynamic duo and together are paving new roads with their cloud first philosophy and innovative business transformation. Both agreed that receiving the Cloud Pioneer award validates their success and innovation, motivating them to continue to raise the bar.

Enterasys, a Siemens Enterprise Communications Company, is a premier global provider of wired and wireless network infrastructure and security solutions. As a Salesforce customer since 2003, they have taken it upon themselves to build an impressive cloud ecosystem of applications that have truly changed they way Enterasys operates and interacts with customers. The company is engaged with Appirio on a state-of-the-art service entitlements project that is touching all aspects of the business. Earlier this week, I chatted with Vala and Dan about the cloud innovation sweeping across Enterasys and what their future plans entail.

For more detail on how Enterasys is raising the bar, follow Dan (@danpetlon) and Vala (@valaafshar) on Twitter.

Q: Can you tell me a little about Enterasys’s business challenges and why you adopted a ‘Cloud First’ philosophy?

Vala: In the early 2000s we had a multitude of disparate systems and no way of leveraging our knowledge into actionable decisions. We spent way too many cycles managing on-premise solutions. It prompted us to start the transformation to make our business processes better. Initially, we weren’t set on the cloud, but as we began looking for apps that best met our needs, we realized that they were predominantly cloud applications. So in the end, we really began to adopt the cloud for the overall business value it delivered.

Dan: I have a great example for why we went cloud. A few years ago, we upgraded our email system from Microsoft Exchange 2007 to 2010. We spent over a year just getting the environment prepped and ready, and then spent another 3-4 months migrating users. In the end, we essentially got no value out of it and wasted a ton of time and resources. After that, we decided no more new development in-house--it just wasn’t a sound investment. In the same year it took us to prep the Exchange environment for the migration, we would have gotten nine feature-rich releases from Salesforce and would not have had to spend any internal resources on it. We worked to train our existing in-house developers on Force.com, Google App Engine, Siteforce and other platforms, in an effort to be as cloud as possible moving forward.

Q: How has “working in the cloud” changed the way Enterasys does business?

Dan: With Salesforce having such a large ecosystem, we’ve been able to create a single view of our customers and partners with an unprecedented level of transparency. We’ve removed boundaries within the enterprise so that any individual within the company can see across sales, services, supply chain, marketing, professional services--the list goes on. From a services point of view for example, we’ve delivered self-service tools for case management powered by Salesforce. Customers and partners can log-in and submit technical issues, request consultation services, examine performance metrics regarding the quality of their engagement, and even get visibility into the engine room.

Vala: Our goal is to be our customers’ favorite vendor. In order to achieve that, we have to act as a trusted advisor. One way we do that is through the high degree of transparency we have developed. With dashboarding and reporting, we can essentially demonstrate to the customer a real-time view of all engagements at any given point-in-time. The visibility demonstrates value and trust.

Q: What did it take to get from vision to execution?

Dan: One of the best things we did was to achieve some small, early successes and socialize them throughout the company.

Vala: We started with the services organization and were able to show value to other functions within the enterprise. For example, if a case is opened with our call center, Salesforce automatically routes a notification to the sales owner to let them know that customer has an open case. Sales can then work with our services organization to prioritize service delivery and eliminate the element of surprise.

Dan: There is always going to be resistance to change, so we took it upon ourselves to pick the right projects early on and achieve enough success that we could ask users to take that leap of faith with us.

Q: From a user perspective, how has adoption been internally and how is it driving the need for future business innovation?

Vala: We have over 1,100 Salesforce licenses--all of our employees are able to leverage the information in our CRM system and adoption is at 100%.

Dan: Salesforce is not the only cloud application being utilized by the masses. We have about 25 or so cloud apps, including Box.net, Google Apps, GoodData, Marketo, and are constantly expanding as our users become more comfortable and demand grows. As our cloud ecosystem expands and more people touch it, adoption just goes up--they literally can’t live without it. They get a taste and they are hungry for more.

Enterasys Cloud-to-Cloud System Integrations

Vala: The key is integration. Any app by itself would simply be a cool widget, but the fact that all of our cloud apps--and even what is left of our on-premise systems--are integrated together with information that flows back and forth, we get tremendous value out of it.

Q: What are some of the exciting things you are working on for the social enterprise and beyond?

Vala: Social media, just like any other tool, is a means to an end. But being a social enterprise in the BtoB space is harder than in the consumer world, so we’re pushing the envelope here. Adoption is slower and a lot of people don’t get the evolution of where things are going and what it means for a machine to chat. If you want to use social media as a way to transform your business you must start with the people--promote transparency and innovation in an effort to achieve mass collaboration. The social enterprise is evolving where now people and machines can communicate and eventually machines will communicate socially amongst each other.

Dan: My team is already doing something along these lines. When a network device chats that something is not working correctly, that chat gets routed to Salesforce and a help desk ticket is created without any human intervention. The help desk ticket is then chattered to the owner of the account and the engineer who is responsible for fixing the issue. This capability is light years ahead of the market and we’re really excited to be leading the charge.

Vala: One of the next cool things we expect to see is addressing the complexity avalanche that many customers face. There is often a huge delta between what a product is capable of doing and how it is actually being used--and this delta keeps getting bigger as technology advances and more features continue to be added. I’m sure I only use 5% of the functionality my iPhone has. We call this the consumption gap. The goal would be to shift to a preventative, offensive service delivery model using predictive analytics in the cloud. You would profile customer usage of a product coupled with their environment and proactively recommend what next feature they should enable based on their unique needs.

Dan: This new technology would take the configuration from customer switches, upload it to Salesforce and run analysis and make recommendations to customers about what they should turn on, what their security posture is, etc. Maybe they haven't had a network outage yet, but because of their configuration, they are ripe to have one soon. This information would allow services teams to proactively call them up and address the risk before anything even happens.

Vala: Anytime you can proactively help a customer, you in turn become a trusted advisor and are well on your way to becoming a favorite company to do business with.

[Blog] Envelope Please... Announcing the Winners for the 2011 Washies

Appirio — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 22:28:00 +0000

By Narinder Singh

Tonight at a happy hour in San Francisco, Appirio announced and toasted the winners of "The Washies" -- our tongue-in-cheek award given to the worst cloudwashing offenders. We first announced the award in October, opened it up for nominations in November and put it out to the public to choose the winners. Voting closed on Monday and even we were a little surprised at the response it received - both good and bad.

Now we’re ready to announce the winners.

It probably comes as no surprise that Oracle was the “Titanic” of the Washies, taking home the majority of category wins - likely attributed to their long history of cloudbashing and their quick about-face to embrace public cloud technology (or maybe it’s just terminology).

So here they are...your 2011 winners.

The biggest overall cloud washer - Oracle: This mega-vendor couldn’t utter the word “cloud” without some kind of skeptical comment until recently, at which time they jumped wholeheartedly on the bandwagon.

The worst case of cloud washed advertising - Microsoft: “To the cloud!” During a television commercial staged with two people bored at an airport, the world saw this company introduce “the cloud” to consumers. Until then it was simply known as “the Internet.” While Microsoft does have some legit cloud solutions in their portfolio, these and their other TV commercials handed them the win in this category.

The most cloud washed statement - Larry Ellison and Oracle: This one was a toss-up, but ultimately, Oracle’s Larry Ellison edged out the competition with his past Churchill Club sound bite, "...we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do.”

The biggest personal cloud washer - Larry Ellison: This was a controversial category that perhaps rightly so raised the ire of some of the nominees, but we have to give the award to Larry. We were a bit surprised that one of the nominees launched a social media campaign to win the award, and had he not set up a bot to auto vote for himself, he may have taken home the prize. But it wouldn’t be right to reward a cheater and, in hindsight, he probably didn’t deserve to be nominated to this category in the first place, so Larry Ellison earned himself his second award of the night.

The most enthusiastic use of the word cloud - salesforce.com: Love for the cloud can sometimes lead to excessive use of the word and other over the top behavior - even among true cloud companies. We freely admit that Appirio often sits in that camp - everything we touch seems to be incomplete without a cloud image. However, salesforce.com edged us out for this category win. Given their strong voice in cloud advocacy, we respectfully accept defeat.

The public has voted - these are your 2011 Washie winners. It was a fun exercise although we can only hope that by next year this award will no longer be needed.

[Blog] Appirio Expands Into Europe with Saaspoint Acquisition

Appirio — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

By Chris Barbin

A few years ago Appirio took a gamble and decided to expand into Japan. At the time we were still pretty young as a company, had to divert some key resources to make it happen, and depend on our partners’ support. It wasn’t an easy decision, but it paid off. Today, Japan is a fast growing part of our business and our experiences there have helped formulate the unique delivery model that we’ve infused throughout the company.

Today, I’m excited to announce that we’re now in Europe and, with the acquisition of Saaspoint today, are one step further in our quest to be THE pure-play global cloud integrator. Saaspoint is the largest and most experienced European-based provider of cloud consulting services and, while it’s our fourth acquisition this year, joining forces with them is a big milestone for Appirio. Here’s why:

It gives us and our partners a proven team on the ground to address the rapidly growing European market. According to IDC, public IT cloud service revenue will reach nearly $73B by 2015, growing 27.6% overall, but more than 35% in Western Europe. It’s a tremendous opportunity for someone who has the expertise and resources to adequately serve this market, and it’s also a focus area for our three strategic partners - salesforce.com, Google and Workday.
It provides us with instant scale for a rapidly growing business. Appirio has experienced near triple digit year-over-year growth in the last few years and we’re signing on a growing number of large, international customers. We’ve scaled our business in some unique ways - for example with CloudSpokes, a crowdsourcing cloud developer community we created earlier this year that now has nearly 30,000 developers in 65+ countries. However, the Saaspoint team enables us to quickly build up our core team to keep up with demand for local European and large, multi-national engagements. The team is already certified and experienced in numerous salesforce.com and Google solutions and we’re excited to apply their skills to building out our Workday practice as well.
It enables us to fill a void in the cloud partner ecosystem. Today customers have had to choose between two extremes - the smaller pure play cloud service providers and the global systems integrators. Both can provide great service, but the size of the pure plays can raise questions about breadth and scalability, while the GSIs can lack the focus, agility and expertise that pure-plays can offer. We’re filling that void. Kind of like that middle bear in the Goldilocks and the Three Bears story - Appirio is “just right.”

By taking Saaspoint’s proven team and regional expertise and supercharging it with Appirio’s breadth, global developer community and the technology assets we’ve built over a thousand projects, we can better serve customers as well. They now have access to a deep, global team that’s demonstrated industry leadership and can support a growing diversity of needs related to cloud adoption.

Appirio and Saaspoint are a great fit in many ways. Saaspoint not only has a great reputation and reach in the region, they are well aligned with our vision, our partners and our culture. They have built a strong business with a significant growth trajectory, and have focused on hiring the best team. Having smart, enthusiastic, customer-driven people around you is pretty important when you’re talking about changing an industry - it doesn’t happen overnight.

So welcome to the Saaspoint team. We’re thrilled to have you part of the Appirio family and look forward to adding more to that family in the future!

[Blog] Introducing Cloud Pioneer Suntech: Learning about cloud adoption from a solar company

Appirio — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:24:00 +0000

By Sara Campbell

The oxymoron was obvious, a solar company embracing the cloud? As the Suntech team sarcastically joked, "Being a company whose business is based on the sun, we just weren't sure about this whole cloud thing." Fortunately, Suntech's business and IT leaders had the foresight to see beyond short term puns and jokes to transform their business with the cloud.

Founded in 2001, Suntech is a multinational organization employing more than 20,000 worldwide and is credited as being the world's largest global producer of cost-effective solar energy solutions. Recently, Suntech's Founder, Chairman and CEO, Dr. Zhengrong Shi and Andrew Beebe, Chief Commercial Officer, were named Appirio Cloud Pioneers.

Dr. Shi and Andrew Beebe are being recognized for their leadership during the company's recent deployment of Salesforce Sales Cloud for global CRM; taking Suntech from separate, homegrown systems to a customized, highly scalable, and global sales infrastructure. We recently sat down with Andrew Beebe to hear first-hand why Suntech decided to move its CRM system to the cloud, what the benefits have been and his experience working with Appirio and Salesforce.

[Blog] Time to Nominate Your Favorite Cloudwasher for the Upcoming “Washies Award”

Appirio — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 11:07:00 +0000

By Narinder Singh

"My game change but my mindframe remains the same, I gotta protect what's mine"
- JayZ, Come and Get Me

A few weeks ago we announced the first ever “Washies Award,” an annual award given to the worst offenders of painting over traditional technology with the word cloud... even if it offers little-to-none of the benefits that cloud computing brings.

There’s no question that the hype around cloud is high. With investment bankers and analysts pointing to the huge market opportunity and growth in cloud computing, and CIOs listing it as their top strategic priority, it’s not surprising that every technology vendor in the world would want a piece of the pie. Who cares if that means contradicting statements they made years or months earlier, or putting lipstick on a pig.

The response to our initial announcement of The Washies was pretty outstanding - we’re still getting tweets about it and early nominations for who should top the award list. Now it’s time to officially nominate your own favorite Washer!

Today on www.cloudwashies.com we opened up nominations for five award categories:

   Biggest cloud washer (overall company) - think of this as the people’s choice award!
   Biggest personal washer (individual)
   Worst case of washed advertising (company)
   Most cloud washed public statement (individual and quote)
   Most enthusiastic use of the word cloud (company)

We’ll be taking nominations through Monday, November 28, at which time we’ll take the top candidates in each category and make them the official nominees. Nominations are confidential, so if you work for a Washer and are just as frustrated as we are by this questionable marketing tactic, feel free to express yourself!

Final voting will begin December 1-12. We’ll be naming the overall category winners on December 14 at a Cloudwashing Award Ceremony at the Cigar Bar in San Francisco. Space is limited but if you’re interested in attending, poking some fun at people who clearly deserve it, and drinking for free, sign up here.

We’ll be sending out more details about the award ceremony in early December.

[Blog] Dreamforce Session - Innovation and Profit: How On-Demand Computing Can Change Your Business

Kirk Crenshaw — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:30:00 +0000

Chris Barbin - Appirio
Kevin Weiss - Author Solutions

On-demand computing offers tons of cost and productivity benefits, but can it really change your business? Appirio offers real-world examples of companies that have successfully made the move to on demand and the hard and soft benefits they realized. Hear directly from one company that’s made the journey, then join an interactive discussion on how your organization can clear a path to the cloud.

[Blog] Dreamforce Session - Getting Started with Salesforce for Google Apps

Kirk Crenshaw — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 00:03:00 +0000

Narinder Singh - Appirio
Chris O'Connor - Genentech
Kraig Swensrud - Salesforce.com

Running a business successfully is hard… but having the right tools makes it much easier. Join us to learn about how the combined power of Salesforce and Google Apps is transforming businesses through a simple, yet powerful combination of CRM and office productivity applications including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Sites, and Google Docs, all designed to work wonders for your business.

[Blog] Dreamforce Session - Extend Force Platform Applications with Google APIs

Kirk Crenshaw — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 23:59:00 +0000

Jason Ouellette - Appirio
Jochen Hartmann - Google
Ron Hess - Salesforce.com

With Google Apps integrated with the Force Platform, it's now easier than ever for developers to build innovative applications in the cloud. Come hear ideas on how to implement new applications that leverage both the Google and Force Platforms and meet with technical experts from both companies.

[Blog] Dreamforce Session - Self-Service as a Destination

Kirk Crenshaw — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 23:55:00 +0000

Glenn Weinstein - Appirio
Rob Taylor - CompassLearning
Chet Chauhan - Salesforce.com

There's no doubt that self-service provides a lower-cost option for service delivery. Companies have to look beyond simple call deflection, however, and make self-service a true destination. Join this session to hear how customers have leveraged the power and flexibility of the Salesforce CRM Customer Portal to deliver services beyond typical support that delight customers.

[Blog] Dreamforce Session - Getting Started with Force.com Sites

Kirk Crenshaw — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 23:45:00 +0000

Tom Scott - Appirio
David Brooks - Salesforce.com
Stephen Brown - Sophiaworks

Getting Started with the New Force Platform Technology

[Blog] Dreamforce Session - Your Web Site - Master of Your Domain

Kirk Crenshaw — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 23:37:00 +0000

Kirk Crenshaw - Appirio
Howard Brown - Demand Results
Brett Crosby - Google

Your Web site shapes how prospects and customers view your business and can be an outstanding lead-generation machine. Join us to learn how to use your website to convey your message, funnel visitor behavior, and effectively use landing pages to convert anonymous visitors into leads. You'll take home best practices for layout, content, and navigation that can maximize the growth of your business.

NOTE: The lower portion of the video is scrambled for the first half of the session.

[Blog] Persistence

Christopher Bruzzi — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 08:50:00 +0000

Malcolm Gladwell has an extraordinary way of pulling together seemingly unrelated facts to explain things that we had previously only understood as just the way the world works. At yesterday afternoon's Dreamforce keynote, he spoke of a story where the math aptitude of a country's children could not only be predicted by a math test, but by the completion (or incompletion) of a 120-question survey that precedes the test. If math was just an innate ability, why could the math scores be predicted by an unrelated survey? Proving that math aptitude is not just a gift with which one is born, the explanation is that the persistent children who had the drive to complete the survey, also were persistent enough to work through and ultimately succeed at the math questions, giving us evidence to support what we have always been told; if you are persistent, you will succeed.

At Appirio, we are always looking for individuals who have this drive of persistence and get excited by the challenge of solving real business problems with on-demand products and services. If this sounds like you, visit us at appirio.com/careers.

[Blog] Appy award winners

Appirio — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:46:00 +0000

- William coker - seagate (crm channel)
- dave debronkart - timetrade (marketing)
- bob linz -tdameritrade (service and support)
- chris bruzzo -starbucks(collaboration)
- team thrivent (enterprise deployment)
- akira iwasaki - japan post (force.com chief innovation officer)
-craig wimpy - citi (customer innovation award)
-bob morell -riskconnect (breakthrough app of the year)
-maxplore (million dollar challenge)
-matt evans -tribune media (mvp award developer)

Congrats to appirio customers timetrade, senior transitions, and a couple we can't name as well as the rest of the winners and nominees !!!!
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

[Blog] We Love our Customers

Dan Guggenheim — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 09:36:00 +0000

Marc Benioff is onstage as I type this, speaking about the importance of turning customers into evangelists. How's this for an example:

Yesterday I attended a Service and Support breakout session where one of our customers presented. He demonstrated a customization that one of our consultants developed, then paused.

"I'm going not going to wait until the end of my speech to share my take-aways with you," he said.

I want to share a take-away right now, and this is it: When someone tries to tell you about the things that aren't possible in Salesforce, don't pay any attention. Call Glenn Weinstein at Appirio, and he'll find a way to make it possible.

I was seated next to Glenn at that moment, and we turned to look at each other. "Now that's a customer," Glenn said. It was a great moment, and one we'll try to repeat as often as we can.

[Blog] Dreamforce, Monday is Over!

Sal Partovi — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 08:52:00 +0000

Monday was a week in itself at this year's Dreamforce. From the initial 3 hour keynote (with roughly 5 major announcements - 2 of which included work from Appirio: Facebook innovation and our Force.com Sites development for Harrah's), to the 11 independent sessions we participated in alone, to the hundreds of visitors to the Appirio Booth, to the hack-a-thon, and finally the amazing Foo Fighters concert. It was a busy Monday, and for good reason too.

At Appirio, we're now at the stage where it's almost becoming complicated to explain how we address our mission statement of accelerating the adoption of on-demand. The reason being is that the tools we're using to complete this aggressive task are so incredibly powerful that they allow us to provide innovation at a pace unprecedented in the industry:

Deliver incredible custom work on web platforms quickly - taking the services discussion from "Months" to "Weeks"
Rapidly deploy new products which address immediate business need, and help turn individual services and platforms into one seamless, powerful cloud

Each of these statements can lead to hour-long converstations on how cloud computing can drastically change a business, and trying to wrap that into a brief booth visit can be cumbersome.

One customer from a world's leading document management organization that dropped by our booth yesterday was clearly interested in learning more about how cloud computing could positively change his business. Yet, as we talked, it became clear that the whole notion can get fairly complicated, and the conversation can become a folly of buzzwords unless truely focused on the individual's need. Though cloud computing is something we're passionate about, it is still just gaining traction in the enterprise, and we not only have to address that concept, but also address our contributions to it. Finally, after realizing that his organization would be a fantastic candidate for our Professional Service Essentials product, he asked this question:

"How are you able to do so much?"

The answer, in my humble opinion, is speed. The power of the platforms we build on is that they allow us to immediately effect business need. Our services are delivered in an order of magnitude faster. Our products are delivered in an order of magnitude faster. Everything we do is faster than anything being done in traditional software. There are plenty of other benefits to cloud computing, but much of the business value comes when we discuss the speed of our service and product deployments.

Ironically, it's that same speed that leads to so much innovation, that you find yourself sitting through a monsterous Monday Dreamforce Keynote and wondering what it all means. Or at a booth overwhelmed by buzzwords. It's our job now to provide not only the rapid innovation that cloud computing allows, but also a clear path to how that innovation can effect businesses. That's our goal at this year's Dreamforce, and it's why events like these are so important. Here's to Tuesday!

[Blog] Extending the Cloud

Appirio — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 08:08:00 +0000

There were a number of great announcements yesterday on the theme of connecting the clouds - Salesforce/Google, Salesforce/Facebook and Salesforce/Amazon. We are truly in the early stages of the types of amazing applications we're going to see going forward. A great example of this was the Facebook jobs application which was featured in the keynote.

As we extend the concept, what could be truly transformational is embedding Social Graph data and Internet-sourced data across an entire business process. For example, consider the following scenario:

One of my friends sees a newsfeed from me about a new product at Appirio. He thinks the product would be a good fit for another friend's company so he makes an introduction that gets fed as a lead into Salesforce. The lead form automatically populates profile information (personal and professional) about the lead, the latest financial information and news about his company (using web services like the ones Google demoed yesterday in spreadsheets) and even competitor information (using features like the "Sets" capability that Google showed yesterday). At this point, the sales person has a warm introduction and a lot of context for an initial conversation, and it is completely automatic!

We are truly only seeing the tip of the iceberg here. As we've mentioned before, the "black magic" part of this is that all this innovation can happen while lowering costs and compressing development cycles significantly. Truly amazing!

[Blog] Jobs4MyFriends

Kirk Crenshaw — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 02:05:00 +0000

Marc Benioff, Sheryl Sandberg and Steve Fischer demo Jobs4MyFriends created for Dell by Appirio.

[Blog] Harrah's VIP by Appirio

Kirk Crenshaw — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 01:52:00 +0000

Marc Benioff and Parker Harris Demo Harrah's VIP system built by Appirio

[Blog] Beating the SaaS Drum

Titash Bardhan — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 01:34:00 +0000

Foo Fighters' Taylor Hawkins

As an eventful Monday closed with some devastating power chords and rhythm, one thing that stood out to me is this guy's intensity. No I'm not talking about Marc Benioff (yet), but rather Taylor Hawkins, who may have been Animal from The Muppet Show in a previous reincarnation. The intense blend of seeming pain and exaltation that constantly took over the man's face and entire demeanor was absolutely awesome.

But in some ways, that's exactly where we all find ourselves.

Visiting booths and talking with various salesforce.com partners, it's clear that there has been some seriously painful blood, sweat, and tears invested in both the groundbreaking and the pedestrian apps and customer solutions on display everywhere at Dreamforce. From basic quoting and order fulfillment, to slick private equity solutions, to painstaking contract management orchestration, to Appirio's deftly-placed entry into the now-joined Force.com and Facebook worlds, it's clear that the bees have been busy.

But without all that pain, the late nights, the go-live weekends, the packaging nightmares, and the unbelievable amount of Visualforce, Apex, Web 2.0, and Salesforce/Google/Amazon/Facebook API code that has been churned out over the just the last few months - without the teeming ecosystem that partners have been able to build with their intense efforts, would salesforce.com ever make a bold gamble like Force.com Sites?

Frankly, while the possibilities are endless, there are also plenty of risks to entering the public web application space, just as there are with trying to tie social networks with core business applications. I think Benioff is being perfectly honest when he says he is "doubling down" on the brilliant track record of his partners and customers, counting on them as he has in the past to fully realize the potential of salesforce.com's audacious moves.

So as partners, our efforts are indeed rewarded and the future is bright. With pain comes exaltation. Just ask Taylor Hawkins.

Appirians Laura and Lori diggin' on Force.com and the Foo Fighters

[Blog] Hackathon: Monday Night Sites

Joe Krutulis — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 23:39:00 +0000

The judges lined up to announce the rules for tonight's hackathon contest:

James Eitzmann and Joe Krutulis of Appirio teamed up with Paul Rodibaugh of Author Solutions, Inc. to compete in the Hackathon. None of us had any experience at all with Sites, but we chose to play to win in the "Unlimited" category anyway. Despite being total Sites neophytes, we still came darn close to pulling together an apex email handler accepting cell phone photos of Monday Night Football Festivities that we were all missing, the new force.com Apex interface to Amazon S3, and a Force.com Site to share the pictures with the public.

But with 4th and goal on the one yard line, the clock ran out.

We'll be back next year!

[Blog] Dreamforce 2008

Appirio — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:31:00 +0000

[Blog] Broad Audience - Narrow Scope

Dan Guggenheim — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:04:00 +0000

This post comes to you live from the "Architecting for Success" session, focused on Dell's 15,000 user global SFA deployment. The following two "best practices" strike me as noteworthy:

Build for a broad audience, but keep the scope narrow
Adopt a long-term deployment strategy with phased deliveries

One could argue that these are common-sense principals, but they're not widely practiced (especially when it comes to large scale ERP implementations, which seem to fail as often as they succeed).

Obviously, we don't always have the luxury to implement sytems in multiple, narrowly-scoped phases. But there are more opportunities to do so on a platform that allows for rapid prototyping and multiple iterations. This is a key advantage of the shorter implementation cycles that come with SaaS.

[Blog] Dynamic SOQL is a Big Deal

Joe Krutulis — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 15:40:00 +0000

I was surprised by how few people in the "Apex Deep Dive" session indicated they were already using Dynamic SOQL! Taggart Mathiesen's demo of Dynamic SOQL at work in Visual Force pages should be plenty of motivation to the Apex Coders out there to give it try soon. If you're not convinced, consider this angle: Dynamic SOQL provides a new work-around for the old auto-number problem!

Custom Auto Number fields cannot be updated by administrators during conversions, loads, or recoveries without temporarily changing the type of the field from "Auto Number" to "Text". Unfortunately, referencing the field in Apex code or static SOQL prevents an administrator from using this technique. This has been a big challenge for several Appirio projects.

If you find yourself in this situation, remember Dynamic SOQL! You can convert your DML statements to Database.query(), update() or insert() calls and convert your anSObject.autonumber__c references to anSObject.get('autonumber__c') or anSObject.put('autonumber__c', ...) statements, and you'll be able to temporarily change the type of the field!

We'll have to do a more detailed write-up of this technique for the Appirio Tech Blog.

[Blog] Notes from the APEX Deep Dive

Kyle Roche — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:14:00 +0000

Thanks to Dave Carroll, Taggart Mathiesen and Rasmus Mencke for the APEX deep dive session. It was more of a high level into the capabilities of APEX (Winter 09 / post keynote). The session started off with a few demos covering the Amazon Web Services integration. Overwhelming attendance by Appirians, by the way. I'm sitting among more than a dozen Appirio consultants.

The next topic was Async (@future) APEX calls. Basically, the ability to call a method on the platform to be executed at a time when the resources are available. See our tech blog for examples on the @future annotation.

After some of the demos on @future and dynamic SOQL, SOSL and DML the guys ran us through some of the coming features w/ APEX.

Batch APEX
Winter 09 brought the async framework through the @future annotation. Batch APEX would allow you to move very long running processes on entire object sets into APEX methods that could be scheduled for execution at a later date.

APEX debugger
The APEX team is working with the Force.com IDE team to provide "step through" of execution of APEX code. Currently, we have to code the logic... execute the code... then debug through the logs or the UI... An APEX debugger would provide evaluation capabilities at each step.

Test Framework enhancements
Enhance the testing framework... (sarcasm) shocking... APEX 'run as' is first attempt to emulate run time behavior for user experience... The APEX team is looking to provide test coverage for call outs...

[Blog] Force.com Sites Unleased !

appirio — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:56:00 +0000

In today's keynote and as reported recently, salesforce.com released the capability to create and run web based apps available to those outside of your company. There were a ton of cool demonstrations shown today and we built many of them (Harrah's, Facebook). We'll highlight those in our Dreamforce Central Blog, but we want to focus on a more subtle point - the rate of innovation and the pace at which it impacts customers.

1. The high rate of innovation of salesforce.com (and other cloud providers) - Two years ago it was Apex code, that allowed real business logic; last year it was Visual Force, that allowed full control over the user experience; this year they announce salesforce sites; allowing you take your apps and expose part or all of them to web users. No enterprise software vendor has come close to matching this pace over the same period of time.

2. The rate at which innovations actually impact customers - In typical on-premise software, even cool new things will require a generation to get into the hands of customers. Already 11 million of Apex Code and more than 50,000 Visual Force pages have been written by salesforce.com customers. We have used both with more than 50 enterprise customers in mission critical apps.

The fact that these two factors can occur while reducing overall IT costs at first glance seems like black magic. But this is in fact the ultimate testament to how different cloud computing is from old world and how far Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and others have to come. You can get started with trying out salesforce and getting started with a trial of all of this in 60 seconds.

How long will it take the others to match that? We have always been fans of cloud computing, but even I sit back stunned at how far the gap is between the old world and the new.

[Blog] Sheryl Sandburg at Dreamforce

Appirio — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:22:00 +0000

Talking about bringing Salesforce and Facebook together for the enterprise

[Blog] Force.com sites - Appirio and Harrahs

Appirio — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:05:00 +0000

How exciting! We're watching the keynote and the Force.com sites
announcement. Parker is demoing the new functionality using the
Appirio built Harrah's demo. If you're at Dreamforce, come by our
booth to see the demos in more detail.

[Blog] Salesforce and Facebook: Connecting the Cloud

Appirio — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:31:00 +0000

We loved today's virtual bear hug between Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com and Sheryl Sandburg of Facebook at Dreamforce. It reminded us of the embrace between Marc and Eric Schmidt of Google back in April, for a couple of reasons:

Another cloud to connect: There are 110 million active users of Facebook... may of these people also find time to work in between their wall postings. Facebook is an open, on-demand application platform, much like Foce.com.
Further consumerization of enterprise IT: Consumers have become accustomed to using the incredible power of social networks to connect with old friends and family in their personal life. Now, with Salesforce and Facebook together, these same people can use the power of this same social network to get their job done
Not just demos: People have talked about bringing the social network to the enterprise every since "Enterprise 2.0" hit the radar. But today's announcement went further-- we saw real business scenarios with the potential to create enormous value for the enterprise. We are thrilled to be part of all this-- we built the recruiting scenario shown by Marc and Sheryl on stage. This is a preview of an application we think every HR head needs to consider

Today's announcement is just the beginning. Just as the Google partnership in April ushered in a host of exciting conversations with customers about how to use these cloud platforms.... we hope today's announcement will do the same, and look forward to continuing the conversation

[Blog] Peppering the Cloud

JT Lovell — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:06:00 +0000

Are you ready?! Salesforce and Google brought the clouds, but we're bringing the rain, baby.

Appirio invaded Dreamforce this year with 80 folks. You can't miss us in our snazzy black t-shirts. And if you see one you really like, stop by our booth and get one yourself.

As I write this we're rocking out to Foo Fighters tunes waiting for 10,500 people to find seats to listen to Marc's opening keynote. This is always the best one when the cool new stuff is announced. So sit back, buckle up, and get ready to be wowed!

[Blog] Keynote info leak

Appirio — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 07:57:00 +0000

As I walk to the Dreamforce keynote I can't help but wonder what this
year's announcement will be. I started looking for signs around the
city. Could we move a busstop to the could? It's technically multi-
tenant... All riders share the same platform (bench)... When the
platform gets upgraded the benefits are available to all users. I don't know. Usually Appirio applications are on the cutting edge of enhancements and integrations (amazon, google, and now facebook) but we aren't doing anything with bus stops. We'll have to wait and see.