Why Is Appirio Expanding into Indiana? A Q&A with Indy Cloud Architect, Nick Marson (@NickyScarfa)

By: Steve Pruden (@stpruden), Director of Consulting Services and Head of Indianapolis Office

Six years ago Appirio started as a small company with a couple of cubes in Salesforce.com's AppExchange incubator in San Mateo, California. Now we're a global company headquartered in San Francisco employing nearly 500 cloud experts worldwide, and supported by a cloud developer community of 45,000 developers in 65+ countries. We have offices on three continents, but today I am most excited to announce our expansion into my hometown, Indianapolis.

Indianapolis?! Why not Munich or Sydney?

Well, maybe someday we'll be there too, but for now Indy makes a whole lot of sense for a rapidly growing company like Appirio. First and foremost, building an office and a modern Cloud Development Center in the Midwest gives Appirio and our customers access to a large, highly-educated pool of technical talent that can invest in, grow, and develop into a team of next-generation cloud architects. This team will not only be in close proximity to our U.S.-based customers, and partners like Salesforce.com and Workday, they can also support customers worldwide. We Appirians have become experts in using social and cloud technologies, as well as our own Cloud Enablement Suite, to collaborate very well virtually.

Today co-founder Narinder Singh and I joined Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels on stage at a press conference to announce our plans to bring at least 300 jobs to the City of Indianapolis over the next three years. You can read the official statements in our press release, but for this blog, I thought it'd be much more interesting to get a more personal perspective from one of our employees on the ground in Indy, Nick Marson.

Nick, you've been in the IT industry for over 10 years but decided to leave the traditional IT world behind and bet your future career on public cloud technologies. Why?

After spending eleven years in various, traditional IT roles, I was ready for a new challenge. For years I’d rolled with a slogan, “enabling with new tech, gracefully releasing the old”, but my previous roles didn’t afford the the luxury of exercising this approach very often. Much of my time consisted of installing Microsoft security patches, maintaining the Exchange Server, rebooting the SAP farm (a weekly task), and maintaining big, dreaded APC uninterruptible power systems. During the most recent couple of years, cloud computing became a growing part of my professional life, and I enjoyed the work. When Appirio decided to open an office in my hometown, I jumped on the opportunity to go “all in” with the public cloud.

What made Appirio stand out for you initially?

Three months ago I saw Appirio co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Narinder Singh, on a YouTube video saying:

“We started Appirio with the mission to change an industry and the kinds of folks at Appirio are passionate about that.  They’re in to looking at things differently than people have seen before and using that difference to make businesses’ and companies’ lives better.”

Narinder's words—along with Appirio's innovative take on technical consulting and their dedication to the public cloud resonated with me and eventually changed my career path. When Appirio chose Indianapolis to land its second U.S. office(and here's a list of all the reasons why I think Indy makes sense for Appirio), I jumped at the chance to join the team.

Now that you've been at Appirio for a few months, what do you think really makes us different from other consulting firms?

Appirio’s successfully attracted and developed an impressive team of rockstar cloud experts and partners. I enjoy and appreciate the culture, transparency, and team atmosphere that, to this day, remains intact from day one of Appirio’s existence. At Appirio, every customer action receives backing from a dedicated and talent-rich team of cloud experts and partners who are laser-focused on customer success. The secret sauce that allows us to deliver in such a radically-efficient and different way is Appirio’s Cloud Enablement Suite. And it doesn’t hurt that our fearless leader Steve can bike circles around anyone (smile).

How does it feel to build something from the ground up?

This is the closest experience I’ve had to working for a “startup”. We benefit from an already well-established global network of Appirians. Appirio has given us (the Indy team) an incredible onboarding experience and also a great deal of influence and say in how we grow this office. We’re empowered with the vision, mission, and charter. Now we move to building it. Have we mentioned that we’re hiring?

Any advice for others looking to change their own career path and join the cloud revolution?

For some the idea of jumping the rails of the traditional IT steam train and hopping aboard the cloud computing bullet train may seem like an intimidating shift. I’d encourage them to do some exploration. Sign up for a free CloudSpokesaccount or a Salesforce developer force account. Spin up a free Amazon Web Services micro instance or deploy a free Google Apps organization. It’s likely they’ll find some synergies between their skillsets and what’s going on in the public cloud space today. Additionally, I’d say come ride bikes with us in the Indy office, hit an Appirian up on Twitter or Facebook, or stop by and see us atDreamforce next month. Talk with our customers to hear firsthand about the transformations they experience from our services. Our all-in public cloud services approach enables our customers’ IT organizations to spend less time, money, and brain power on “keeping the lights on” tasks and instead allows them to focus more on efforts that influence their core businesses. See how we help IT staffers get out of the data center business and get into doing business that directly affects their organizations. So check us out and come join the revolution!

Customer Spotlight - Q&A with Celia Stokes and Dianne Conley, K12

By Sara Campbell

Please join me in congratulating Celia Stokes, EVP and Chief Marketing Officer and Dianne Conley, VP of Marketing Systems at K12 Inc., our latest customers to receive the Appirio Cloud Pioneer award.

K12 is a publicly traded education management company, based in Herndon, Virginia, that provides online schooling and curriculum to both public and private educational institutions, as well as to individual students and families.

Recently, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Celia and Dianne to learn more about K12’s business, how it has been impacted by the cloud and what it means to them to be named Appirio Cloud Pioneers for 2012.

Q: Could you tell me a little about K12’s business?
Celia: K12’s mission is to develop each child's full potential with an engaging, individualized learning curriculum. We provide district, charter and private schools with a full range of online education solutions from full-time programs to supplemental advanced and remedial courses for students from kindergarten through 12th grade worldwide.

Dianne: For parents, making decisions about their child’s education is not something taken lightly. It is often an emotional decision that comes with intense research, thought and planning. Our goal is to provide a warm, relevant and personal customer experience at every touchpoint, including access to enrollment and customer care professionals, to help guide and support parents and students through this very important, and sometimes overwhelming process.

Q: What challenges was K12 facing that you have addressed with Salesforce.com?
Dianne: With that goal in mind, we had to take a step back and realize that we weren’t doing everything we could to make the family counseling process a positive, easy experience for those seeking educational alternatives. We were operating on a painfully slow homegrown CRM system that had an extremely limited ability to integrate with other systems. Our enrollment and customer care reps couldn’t access the information they needed while on the phone with parents and we had limited tracking of interactions with multiple people within the same family. Our interactions with students and families were not as efficient or personal as we wanted.

Celia: Changes needed to be made and we realized we didn’t want to just replace one technology with another. We wanted to build a foundation that would allow us to transform the customer experience. We wanted to change the game.

Q: How has “going cloud” changed the way K12 does business?
Celia: K12 went live with Salesforce in early 2012 in an effort to build the foundation that would allow us to transform our customers’ experience. Our enrollment agents now have complete visibility into a family’s motivation for seeking an education alternative, the enrollment process, and the stage a prospective student is in during the application process. They are better equipped to proactively advise the family through their decision process. Additionally, as a business, we have access to real-time reports and information into how our marketing efforts are generating interest in K12 programs, as well as driving actual enrollment. And we don’t have to worry about the servers burning up or going down.

Dianne: Partnering with Appirio and Salesforce in the cloud has allowed us to customize some really key functionality. An example that is essential to our business is the related leads look-up logic that suggests possible related contacts within the same family, based on last name, phone number, email, or other piece of personal information. This allows us to improve enrollment center efficiency and improve customer experience by streamlining interactions and information-sharing among different family members all calling about the same student.

Q: What future plans does K12 have?
Dianne: Moving forward, we really want to be more proactive with our customer care and better understand our customers via the social media channels they participate in. We’ve used Radian6 for years for social media listening, and we’re eager to take it to the next level by integrating it with Salesforce to scale our responsiveness on those channels.

Celia: Our goal is to be able to identify a question or issue communicated via social media and immediately, programmatically, match that Twitter or Facebook account with one of our existing customer records to create a case or, in the case of a new prospect, a lead. This would allow us to leverage the knowledge of our enrollment and customer care center, right within Salesforce, and be able to interact with and provide relevant information to families via the social media channels they prefer.

Dianne: Additionally, we’re planning to rebuild other key technology components that support our enrollment process on the Force.com platform...and the list goes on.

Q: Recently Appirio recognized you and Celia as Cloud Pioneers. What does being named a Cloud Pioneer mean to you?
Celia: Embarking on the mission to bring in a new CRM system was scary and risky. We did so with great trepidation after hearing about the myriad examples of companies who had done this and failed. Selecting Salesforce and Appirio, and then achieving buy-in (and staking our reputations on it) was daunting. The fact that we launched on time and on budget as promised was not only a relief but personally satisfying for the whole team. Being named a Cloud Pioneer is a profound layer of frosting on the cake.

Dianne: Celia, does this mean I get a raise? All kidding aside, bringing Saleforce.com into K12 with the blessing of our CIO at the time was an achievement in itself. Appirio deserves a huge amount of credit for gaining the confidence of both our Marketing and IT teams by demonstrating that you understood our business and would be a steadfast partner in our success with Salesforce. Your team has been the major force behind the success of a project that represents a lot more than a new technology platform. They have brought a level of confidence that we can accomplish great things in concentrated timeframes and introduced an entirely new way of working to our organization. And you drank our coffee, we should be giving you guys the award! But really, we are honored to have been singled-out by Appirio for our innovation.

Enterprise Applications in a Mobile-first World

By Balakrishna Narasimhan (@bnara75)

There are more than 6 billion mobile phone subscriptions in the World today. According to the World Bank, that number will soon exceed the human population. By 2015, IT advisory firm IDC predicts that more people in the US will access the internet through mobile devices than through desktop or wired devices. There’s no question that we increasingly live in a mobile-first world.

For businesses, this means operating in a world where customers, partners and employees are all using mobile devices to interact with your company. For enterprise IT, this means putting a mobile-first filter on everything they do, from websites to portals, applications and more. CIOs are keenly aware of this and mobile technologies are now their 2nd priority (behind analytics and business intelligence).

Mobile vs. Mobility
So what does it mean to be “ready for mobile”? David Armano (@armano) of Edelman Digital recently wrote an insightful article on this topic in the Harvard Business Review. He points out that as we ready our businesses and applications for mobile, “it's not about mobile as much as it is about understanding mobility”. This may seem like a pedantic distinction at first but it’s actually profound. Thinking about mobile as simply a new delivery channel reduces the problem to making one’s existing applications and content available on one or more mobile devices. Instead, being ready for mobile should mean thinking about what mobility means to customers, partners, and employees and designing applications that address these new needs.

Success in a mobile-first world requires recognizing that mobility creates new behaviors and needs. David describes some of these new behaviors including “lean back” activities like watching videos on a train, “lean forward” activities like shopping for a gift at work or “lean free” activities like checking in to a favorite restaurant while walking in. Enterprises who are thinking about mobilizing their applications can start by looking at what people use mobile devices for in their personal lives, since those are the behaviors and patterns that people will bring to work along with their shiny new mobile devices.

Content is King, at Home and at Work
On tablets for example, most of what consumers do revolves around consuming content. All the top 10 activities on tablets involve content consumption - not content creation, analysis or transactions. The lesson for enterprise IT is that people are likely to want to use their business tablets in much the same way, to find and consume content.

Over the past year, Appirio has helped hundreds of enterprises with mobility and we’ve learned a few things along the way. First, as with consumer mobile, content is king. Second, mobile devices make it possible to capture new types of customer information right at the point of interaction. Third, in order for people to use enterprise applications on mobile devices, the applications have to look as little like traditional applications as possible.

Today, Appirio is announcing three configurable mobile cloud applications that encapsulate these lessons and address the most common use cases we’ve seen so far:

• Content Delivery: instantly delivers the most up-to-date marketing or sales content to improve one-to-one interactions.
• Closed Loop Marketing: enables companies to measure where marketing content is being used in the field and the impact of that spend.
• Mobile Survey: allows sales, marketing and executive teams to gather real-time feedback from customers. 

Mobile + Cloud = Best of Both Worlds
All three applications use Salesforce.com on the backend, which makes them very easy to manage, configure and scale. Each application extends a customer’s existing investments in Salesforce CRM while providing a user experience designed specifically for mobility.

• The content delivery application extends Salesforce content management system to distribute content to mobile devices
• The closed loop marketing application enhances CRM customer profiles with data on what each customer has seen
• The mobile survey applications brings real-time customer feedback into CRM

These applications incorporate traditional CRM functions behind the scenes, but since the actions are contextual and natural, the user experience is very different. For example, with the closed loop marketing application, all it takes to track a visit and all content shown to a customer is tapping a “check-in” button when you walk into the customer’s office.

All three applications are part of our growing mobile asset library, which captures common needs across customers. The assets in our Cloud Asset Library range from configurable applications like the ones mentioned above to reusable components for specific pieces of functionality, such as check-ins or QR code scanning. With these assets, creating a new mobile application is often a matter of configuration and assembly rather than coding from scratch. Less time coding means more time to define a great mobile strategy and create a compelling user experience. You can learn more about our mobile offerings on our brand-new, responsive and retina-ready website.

What Are Your Mobility Plans?
Are content delivery, closed loop marketing, and mobile surveys good starting points for what your company is trying to do with mobility? What other use cases are you thinking about? Let us know in comments or @appirio on Twitter.