Becoming a Customer Company: Why and How?

By Balakrishna Narasimhan (@bnara75)

Today, Salesforce unveiled the next phase in their evolution as a company. Over the past few years, they have been the most vocal evangelists of the “social enterprise,” or the idea that businesses need to become social if they want to stay competitive. Initially, the message was focused around internal collaboration and making enterprise applications as powerful, simple and collaborative as Facebook. Over time, Salesforce’s notion of social business grew to include building a social profile of a customer, marketing and engaging with customers on social networks, selling and servicing them using social networks and making products social.

The idea of social has been a great unifying theme for Salesforce and has been one that has clearly differentiated them from other enterprise software companies. However, it took some storytelling panache (think Marc Benioff on stage) and the right audience to really connect the social enterprise concept to business outcomes. The other issue with the focus on social business was that it was not as closely tied to sales and customer service, which are still Salesforce’s core business areas.

Cloud for Cloud's Sake

By Glenn Weinstein (@glennweinstein)
CIO, Appirio

Source: SearchCloudComputing.com

It’s popular in consulting circles to reframe technology questions in business terms.  Often, after a few minutes of good deep technical conversation, someone will chime in with something like “well, what’s really important is improving business outcomes” or “it’s not just the technology, it’s about the people and the process.”

All true, of course.  It’s a variant on another common theme in the software industry, “don’t sell features, sell value.”  I admit I quickly get bored, and lose context, when a vendor comes in spouting features before telling me why they are important, or what problem they solve.

All that said, though, the technology is important, and it’s important for its own sake.  I see this as a “necessary but not sufficient” scenario, with emphasis on the “necessary” part - the right technology is definitely necessary, even if it’s not sufficient by itself to prove business value.

7 Things CXO's Can Do to Ensure Success with Social

by Charlie Cowan (@iamcharliecowan)

Source: University of Luxembourg

The World is going social.  The analysts have social as one of their key trends to watch.  Facebook had their multi-billion dollar IPO in 2012.  New networks like Pinterest, Instagram and Path command mega-valuations.  Everyone is sharing, sharing, sharing.

And then you see an amazing Chatter demo at Dreamforce and you say to your fellow Execs “We’ve got to deploy Social in our company right now!”  But wait – being a social business is much more than technology – it’s about your people, it’s about your culture.

Before you press “Go!” on your social revolution here are a few things you should do to prepare.

CloudSpokes - The World’s Largest & Most Productive Cloud Computing Workforce

Happy Two Year Anniversary … Looking Forward to Changing the Industry By Our 20th Year

By Chris Barbin (@c_barbin)

Two years ago today on Valentine’s Day, Appirio set the world up on a date with CloudSpokes - the first crowdsourcing platform and community focused purely on public cloud application and platform development. This news was met with both excitement and, not surprisingly, a fair bit of skepticism.

Since that day, CloudSpokes has turned even some of the biggest skeptics into believers. Today CloudSpokes has more than 70,000 developers and design specialists across 100+ countries. Some of the leading pure-play cloud providers - from Salesforce.com and Amazon, to Box and Docusign - are already using CloudSpokes in some way.

When we started Appirio, we knew with cloud services, the services industry was ripe for disruption.  In our original thesis, Services 2.0 in April 2007 we actually stated:

The Appirio Company Meeting, Cloud-Style

by Glenn Weinstein
Co-founder and CIO

500 employees, scattered globally across nearly 180 locations, gathering for a virtual all-hands company meeting with slides, live video and audio feeds, in-person special guests, recorded videos, and polls. What could go wrong?

In reality, Appirio’s annual meeting on Friday, Feb. 1 came off without a hitch. In past years we’d gathered all employees at in-person events in San Francisco, Scottsdale, or Napa. But this time we decided to try it virtually, asking Appirians to congregate in one of 19 gathering places, including our San Francisco HQ, our Indianapolis development center, our London office, and various conference rooms and homes across the U.S., Europe, and Japan. About 160 employees who didn’t live close enough to a gathering spot would join from home offices.

At first we contemplated hiring an events firm to handle logistics. But we decided that Appirio, one of the original 100% cloud, no-server companies, could pull this off using our existing technology, at $0 incremental cost. And we did! Our success was due mostly to attention to a series of minor details, which added up to an immersive experience. We also benefitted from the comfort level in our cloud technologies that comes with everyday use.

Empowering the New Workforce with a New Partner

By Jason Averbook (@jasonaverbook)

I have the opportunity to work with some of the most innovative and creative thinkers in Human Capital Management today - people and organizations that are truly endeavoring to transform the way we work.

Transforming the way people work may sound lofty, but HR's ability to make employees more collaborative, productive and engaged can have a huge impact on a company's bottom line and overall customer satisfaction.  As the world's largest cloud-powered HR consultancy, Appirio has a ton of experience helping organizations develop, deploy and extend transformational HR strategies, and putting that in lock-step with the HCM technology that brings those strategies to life.

Today we are excited to announce a deepening relationship with Cornerstone OnDemand, which is seen by customers and analysts alike as one of the leading cloud-based learning and talent management solutions out there. Read the press release here.

Making a Life While Making a Living: How to Reboot Work and Unleash the Awesome Power of a Super-engaged Workforce

by Jason Averbook

When I’m out speaking with customers and colleagues, the topic of conversation often turns to what HR and IT leaders should be focusing on in 2013. All agree that, as my colleague Nick Hamm rightly says in his recent post, 2013 CIO Playbook - 5 Things CIOs Must Do This Year, there is no shortage of buzzwords to distract you from actually making progress and getting things done.

This reminds me that even though HR often focuses on process, and IT sometimes gets caught up in technology, both are still a people business. As HR and IT leaders, we have to remember the main reasons to deploy cloud, mobile and social technologies is to transform relationships with customers, partners and employees. Specifically for employees, the promise is that we can deliver amazing technology that can quite literally improve the quality of life for our employees by offering them anytime, anywhere access to work. However, the very same cloud and mobile technologies that enable this kind of freedom from being chained to one’s desk, can create unrealistic expectations of employee accessibility and all but eliminate the concept of work/life balance.

Sunny Days in Cloud Platform Development

Mathew Gilbuena, Connie Hall, Julie Wood

Successful cloud platform adopters find their users becoming more innovative, nimble, and quicker to embrace change. Cloud applications are continuously evolving at an unprecedented pace - providing organizations an enormous potential for customization, quickening of business process and acting as a catalyst for change. To stay focused on key decision-making and other priorities, successful adopters are using modern development practices and teams of expert Cloud Management Engineers to reduce backlog.

As members of the Appirio Cloud Management team, we directly support, manage and grow hundreds of Salesforce.com instances. Our success is the result of working with developers selected for specific expertise and our strict adherence to the Agile development methodology. By forging close relationships with our customers through the use of technology, we create progress and witness transformations brought on by our responsiveness to the changing market.

Crowdsourcing Arrives...at Super Bowl XLVI

by Mark A. Koenig (@mark_koenig)


Earlier this month we wrote about how Crowdsourcing has hit Primetime. Now, right on cue comes Super Bowl XLVII and the advertising event that goes along with it. What's most striking to us about the runup to this year’s Super Bowl advertising is the ubiquity of crowdsourcing. In less than 2 years, the term “crowdsourcing” has moved from a term used mainly by academics and other thought-leaders into the mainstream vocabulary. In fact, some media professionals are calling Super Bowl XLVII the Crowdsourcing Bowl.

Here are some examples of what you can expect to see during Sunday’s game:

• Pepsi and Beyonce are crowdsourcing participation in this year’s halftime show. You have probably already seen the TV ads and invitations to submit photos that will be used for the advertising, and of course some lucky participants will get to dance on the field during Bey’s show. 
• Pizza Hut is inviting its customers to upload videos of themselves playing the quarterback and calling out “Hut hut hut”. We’ll admit it is clever and look forward to the results. 
• Doritos is once again inviting fans of their brand to create advertising spots and submit them. They will choose two to air during the big game. 
• Lincoln is launching its embrace of social media with a multi-channel campaign that began on Twitter (“What was your wackiest-ever road trip?”) and will end up with the results broadcast during the big game.