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

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

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

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

Can Do Canines wins Extreme Cloud Makeover -- Nonprofit Edition

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.

Three Ingredients for Improving Open Innovation

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.

1. 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! 
2. 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. 
3. 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!

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

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.

Envelope Please... Announcing the Winners for the 2011 Washies

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.

Appirio Expands Into Europe with Saaspoint Acquisition

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!