The Merits of Cloud Management - A Customer Q&A with Glocap Search

By Sara Campbell

Customer stories are by far the best way to explain how cloud technology is changing the face of business. Today, I’m excited to share an interview with Christina Guerland from Glocap Search, a recent recipient of Appirio’s Cloud Pioneer Award which recognizes the change agents and champions inside our customer base who are making a real impact on their businesses with cloud solutions.

Glocap is a premier search firm dedicated to serving the specialized recruiting needs of clients in various industries. The company turned to Appirio to deploy multiple applications on the Force.com platform, and to help maintain and continuously improve those systems post-implementation. Christina is a vice president at Glocap and works directly with the CEO on a myriad of firm-wide projects.

Q: What business problem was Glocap Search trying to solve?
A: We were looking to replace our multi-faceted proprietary recruiting system. We had a desire to outsource the ornery aspects of ongoing system maintenance and, at the same time, leverage software that was specific to our needs yet still highly customizable.

Q: Why did you choose cloud platforms for your core recruiting engine?
A: After many months of research we found cloud solutions to be the most flexible. Given the “openness” of the cloud, we felt confident that we would be able to accomplish all future objectives that may become a high priority. For example, we have a strong desire to connect our “front end” recruiting application with our “back end” accounting and believe this can be tackled in a future project.

Q: Why did you choose Appirio?
A: Appirio was recommended to us by salesforce.com. Appirio shared their expertise and helped us evaluate all solutions we were considering; the team worked diligently to identify any gaps between our then-current system and the prospects to ensure proper vetting and minimize the surprises during implementation. Appirio was our partner throughout the shopping process and ultimately our hand-holders though the entire implementation project. They developed all of the custom code we use and we are also using Appirio’s Cloud Management team for ongoing support and enhancements.

Q: What was the implementation process like?
A: The implementation process was incredibly complex given the nuances of our then-current system and lack of documentation. We were using multiple applications on the Force.com platform in addition to custom code written by Appirio to accomplish all of our use cases.

Q: How are you managing the new system in place?
A: I am the primary contact for anything related to our cloud system. This is possible because Appirio’s team is assisting us with feature enhancements and any new development on the platform. We chose to use Appirio’s Cloud Management services because we wanted to be sure to support our users as they adjusted to a brand new system. We also understood that there may have been some aspects we missed in the implementation so we wanted to be able to respond quickly to requests. Appirio’s Cloud Management team helps with the more technical adjustments (workflows, triggers, setup of automated data clean-up processes, updates to visual force pages, etc), freeing up my time to assist the management team and coach our recruiters on using the system for revenue-generating activities.

Q: What advice do you have for others looking to implement/use cloud solutions?
A: I highly encourage others to investigate how a cloud-based solution might work for their business. The options available to you are abundant and will continue to grow. While the process of transitioning from your current system can be nerve-racking, the scalability of adopting a cloud-based solution will be worth the energy.

Learning from Our Customers - Bern Abplanalp, Convio

We recently hosted a webinar for our customers on Salesforce Chatter and Ideas best practices based on our own use of these products. We were thrilled to have a guest speaker, Bern Abplanalp, Business Operations Analyst at Convio, join us for a discussion about his experience rolling out Chatter. Convio is a leading provider of on-demand constituent engagement solutions that enable nonprofit organizations to more effectively raise funds, advocate for change and cultivate relationships with donors, activists, volunteers, alumni and other constituents. Bern has helped Convio adopt Salesforce CRM and Appirio’s PS Enterprise to manage Convio’s services teams and therefore brings the perspective of someone who uses Salesforce and Force.com to manage the core of his business.

Since many of you have asked us about Chatter, we thought we’d summarize our conversation here.

Why did you decide you needed Chatter at Convio?

We wanted to use the proactive communication elements of the tool. For example, when Sales would update status on an opportunity, our professional services managers wanted to immediately be updated without having to ask. There were also collaboration features we wanted to use that would expedite the conversation by virtue of being fully integrated with the Salesforce environment, e.g., project or account-related collaboration.

What was your rollout plan for Chatter within Convio?

There wasn’t a lot of material out there about how to rollout Chatter, e.g., sample communication plans, etc., so much of this was of our own making. We used the following approach:

• Identified SMEs (subject matter experts) within our primary functional areas(Sales, Services, Marketing) who would be our “trusted testers”
• Used SMEs to validate initial list of fields to be tracked (by Chatter) and get overall feedback on the Chatter tool. Because Chatter cannot be on/off for specific user profiles, we had to have a holistic plan for all SF users that would provide the right information that people needed without being overwhelming to others.
• Created a structured messaging strategy including various pieces of collateral to support the Chatter deployment including Custom Training Tutorials (screen casts), Chatter Implementation Guide (for managers/team leads), Chatter v. Other Apps, Chatter FAQ & Terminology, Chattequette
• Encouraged users to learn about Chatter by using Chatter by setting up a “Getting Started” Chatter group

How has Chatter been received at Convio?

Thus far it’s been very positive. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of users who were admittedly pessimistic about Chatter initially, but once they saw the potential, have become big advocates. If we turned off Chatter, after just 3 weeks, I would be lynched.

What pieces of advice do you have for others who’re thinking about Chatter?

• Don’t be complacent and under-manage the deployment process of Chatter just because Chatter is easy to use. It’s a powerful tool, but there isn’t a lot of collateral/training/tutorials on rolling out the tool, so take the time to think about and define how/when to use Chatter for your users.
• Embrace the credo “less is more” - don’t try to make every object in your Salesforce org a participant in the conversation!
• Provide clear guidance for when to use Chatter relative to other tools (e.g. IM, email, Salesforce Reports…)
• Preview Chatter to management teams separately prior to release so they know what to expect and can set the proper guidelines for their teams

Many thanks to Bern for a lively and insightful discussion. We're excited about many more of these and learning from you, our customers! If you'd like to be a part of this series, please leave a comment below or email us.

Learning from the Pioneers - Vetrazzo

Today, we'll be speaking to James Sheppard.  James is the CEO of Vetrazzo.  Vetrazzo collects discarded glass from sources as diverse as last night's chardonnay and Heineken bottles to decommissioned traffic lights and and transforms it into beautiful, eco-friendly surfaces such as countertops and tabletops.  James is a veteran software industry executive who took over the helm at Vetrazzo in 2006.  James has overseen a radical reinvention of Vetrazzo's IT foundation and now runs Vetrazzo's manufacturing, warehousing and distribution operations entirely in the cloud.

We'll be speaking to James about what led him to build an ERP system in the cloud and what he's learned from the experience.

Who is Vetrazzo and what is your role there?

I am the CEO of Vetrazzo.  Vetrazzo manufactures a recycled glass surfacing material for use as countertops, vanities and more.  Think of it as a sustainable alternative to granite and other quarried stone.  We're excited to be part of the rapidly growing market for green building products.  Our product has been in the market for 13 years but we relaunched the Vetrazzo brand under a new company about 4 years ago.

What led you to look beyond traditional manufacturing solutions such as SAP and Oracle?

When we formed Vetrazzo 4 years ago, a lot of the internal manufacturing operations were being run off spreadsheets.  We knew there was a big opportunity to gain efficiencies if we had the right system to manage our operations - inventory, manufacturing, etc.

Our requirements for our new system were the following:

• Needed a web-based system to support multiple locations and plants
  
• Wanted remote users to have the same experience as others
  
• Wanted to scale and grow the business without a large dedicated IT team
  
• Needed fast turnaround time on developing new application functionality
  

We couldn't find anything off-the-shelf that could work for us without a lot of development effort.  We looked at solutions such as SAP and Oracle but they are a bear to configure and customize.  Then, in April 2008, we started thinking about using Force.com.  We'd been using Salesforce at Vetrazzo for CRM but weren't aware of what the platform could do beyond CRM.  But after Salesforce built a prototype of a manufacturing system, we were convinced that it could address our needs.

What made you take the leap of faith to a new platform?

Frankly, it wasn't that much of a leap of faith.  I saw from looking at the prototype that there was nothing limiting what was possible with the platform.  The alternative of building something on my own or heavily customizing Oracle or SAP was a non-starter economically.  Since all we had to invest in was the platform licenses and some consulting fees to help us build the app, the decision became quite easy.

What happened after you decided to build your ERP system on Force?

We engaged a Salesforce partner to help us start building the applications we needed.  I'd already done a ton of work gathering requirements and putting a very formal structure in place so I thought I could re-use that to drive the Force development project.  I was prepared for a typical IT project with traditional waterfall processes, offshore and onshore teams, etc.  Once we got going, I found that whatever I could dream up could be developed quickly.  We gave up the traditional approach and start working iteratively because we could build as quickly as I could come with ideas.  In 7 months, we built a system that would have taken years and perhaps millions of dollars to develop using on-premise platforms.

What processes do you currently have in the cloud?

Other than financials, we run our entire business is in the cloud.  We use Salesforce CRM to manage our leads/opportunities and we have a custom Force.com application for core operations.  Our core operations system includes manufacturing, inventory, production planning, customer service, shipping, warranty management, equipment maintenance, plant reporting, quality assurance, channel training, purchasing and more.  It's really a full-featured ERP system in the cloud.

What was different about developing in the cloud compared to what you've experienced in the past?

There were three main things that were very different than what I've seen before.  The first is speed of development.  We could literally build apps as quickly as I could dream them up.  I've never had this experience before.

As a direct result of the speed of development, we were able to move to a very iterative model rather a traditional approach.  This was much more effective.  Finally, we found that we could operate with very lean teams.  All we needed was a business analyst and a developer.  We didn't need a large on-shore team to gather requirements, map the current and future state and then an offshore team for development.

What advice do you have for customers who are considering moving to the cloud?

Every organization should pick a small app and try building it in the cloud.  If you do, you'll see that you can get something live and get a win in the same time that you'd be having your 48th meeting on requirements.

You should resist the temptation to pick something too small.  Unless you pick something that matters, it'll be hard to demonstrate benefits and prove value.  We started with managing production, ordering and shipping for our product.  Not everyone needs to do that but picking something that matters and addresses a real pain point is critical.

For many organizations, the best way to build momentum is by demonstrating the value of building in the cloud. By building an app on Force.com, you can demonstrate how quick, cost-effective and easy-to-support cloud apps are.

Note: Vetrazzo is not an Appirio customer

Learning from the Pioneers - Schumacher Group

Today, we'll be speaking to Doug Menefee. Doug, a Gulf War veteran, has been involved with technology
since the early 1990’s. In 1994, he resigned from the University of Louisiana to become a pioneer in the Internet economy by co-founding Planet Symphony, a website creation and interactive marketing management company. The company gained national attention in 1995 when it staged the first-ever Internet video broadcast of Mardi Gras. Keeping his roots in Louisiana, Menefee remained with The Graham Group, leading the convergence of interactive and traditional media until 2001 when he transitioned back into an entrepreneurial role by co-founding MenefeeINSIGHT and Yadacast. In 2005, Menefee joined Schumacher Group as Chief Information Officer.

Doug has overseenan IT transformation at Schumacher Group and has been an aggressive adopter of cloud computing.

We'll be talking to him about his experiences with the cloud and how it's changed the role of IT within his company.

Could you give us a brief overview of the Schumacher group and your role?

Schumacher is an emergency department management company. We manage emergency departments for hospitals across the US. We have 150+ physician practices across the country. Schumacher is growing very quickly, over 30% annually. When I joined in 2005, we were at 110 contracts and saw nearly 2 million patients a year. We now have over 150 contracts and provide quality health care to almost 3 million patients a year.

As the CIO of Schumacher Group, I'm focused on defining our IT strategy reporting directly to our CEO. Our CEO, Dr. Schumacher, is a strong advocate of IT and views IT as a strategic part of the company, not as a cost center.

What drove you to consider cloud computing?

As you know, I have a background in web application development, so I'm an advocate of the web and the http protocol. Our driver was not so much about being in the cloud but about what meets our business objectives best.

There were really three main drivers for us to consider cloud solutions.

First, our biggest driver was scalability, given our rapid growth. Having to maintain and size a server architecture is hard without knowing what the growth rate is going to be in the future. It's not only hard but capital and resource intensive to predict growth and size resources appropriately. The cloud solves that problem for us.

Second, disaster recovery became a big priority for us. This came to the forefront when we were doing a technology refresh for CRM. During that month, Louisiana got hit back-to-back with hurricanes (Katrina and Rita) and we saw the pain of the CIOs who got hit in the Gulf Coast area. At this point, we saw that cloud applications could offer us much better business continuity capabilities than we had in-house.

Finally, we found that web-delivered applications opened up the opportunity for our team to focus on innovation vs managing server farms.

Today, we have over 50% of our applications in the cloud with the rest in our two datacenters.

Where are you using the cloud in your business and how did this evolve?

Most of the cloud processes are net new to our business. We have found that it's much easier to build on Force.com rather than our on-premise platforms. We've built custom applications for recruiting (physician recruiting), credentialing/pre-qualification, healthcare analytics, and for the logistics of managing 2500 physicians across the nation.

A couple of exceptions. We moved our financials from on-premise Peoplesoft to hosted Peoplesoft (A/R, A/P and G/L). Second, we're in the process of transitioning our HR to Workday. So far, we've moved all our employee data into Workday and we have benefits up and running. Payroll and performance management are slated to go live at the end of 2009.

One of the things that we're maintaining in our datacenter is our enterprise data warehouse. We are considering a cloud BI solution for analytics and dashboards but so far our enterprise data lives on-premise in the Microsoft stack.

How has the cloud changed your role as a CIO?

Where do I start? I have a smaller ops team and a much larger service delivery team. We've shifted more of our focus to innovation and data quality.

I sleep a lot better at night because I only have to worry about 50% of what I used to have to worry about. This is because I have a high level of security and availability. I know availability is a worry for many CIOs moving to the cloud but quite frankly, there are many more outages and internally than externally. When it comes to security, cloud service providers have large teams of experts exclusively focused on security, whereas my small IT team has multiple areas of focus which include security.

The biggest impact is that the cloud has enabled me to be a transformational CIO. I focus on business strategy and processes vs. being a manager of information technology and hardware. This is a fundamentally different approach to the CIO role since it's all about relinquishing control. I don't want to be the bottleneck. The fact is that technology has become more user-friendly so users can take a much more active role in choosing, configuring and using applications. I don't want to restrict this entrepreneurial spirit, but rather orchestrate it. To take the metaphor further, IT is a conductor in front of an orchestra. We're guiding the use technology but not "managing" and "controlling".

What this requires is a new mindset. There are CIOs who are resistant and still want to control everything. You can take that approach but when the business that's next to you starts moving to the cloud and developing apps in 3-4 weeks, they'll start kicking your butt and you'll have to re-evaluate your approach.

What advice do you have for CIOs considering moving their businesses to the
cloud?

1. Surround yourself with web services developers.
2. Don't buy into the cloud hype, but look at your business needs and see what best meets your needs. Make sure you don't disqualify things that are either on-premise or in the cloud. But, even with an open mind, I find that 9 times out of 10, the solution that best fits my needs is cloud-based.
3. Look at the processes that are already running the cloud within your company. Then compare this to what other companies or consumers are running in the cloud. By looking internally and externally you can see where you can expand your cloud usage.
4. To reduce the risk from moving off-premise, take a look at business continuity or business interruption insurance policies. To be honest, this is equally relevant to your internally-run applications.

Learning from our customers - ThomasNet

Learning from our customers: ThomasNet's migration to the cloud

Inspired by what Marc Benioff said at Structure 09 last month, we've begun a new series on learning from our customers. We are kicking off the series with Brian Makas, Manager of Business Intelligence at ThomasNet. Brian helped ThomasNet move sales, marketing, support and recruiting to the cloud over the past few years. ThomasNet is the leading online industrial marketplace and business-building site connecting buyers and sellers worldwide.

Brian is a frequent speaker on marketing and cloud computing. He spoke at a marketing ROI panel at Dreamforce last year and also presented the ThomasNet story (with us) at a recent salesforce.com executive event in Falls Church, Virginia. In his spare time, Brian is an NHL and UFC fanatic. He shares his thoughts on all four of his interests (marketing, cloud computing, NHL and UFC) on Twitter (@brianmakas).

What problem was ThomasNet looking to solve that lead to using salesforce.com?

We had two very specific problems to address: managing existing prospects and distributing new leads. For prospect information, we used to print out massive book directories that were created once a year. These were then mailed out to regional sales representatives who used that information for the year. It was a nightmare, as we had no centralized place to store prospect information and of course the information would get stale pretty quickly. When it came to distributing new leads, our previous process was based around a "fire and forget" mentality - after we distributed a new lead to a sales representative we really had no way to enrich that record, that is to add more contacts, activity history, etc. that we might acquire after it was first sent out.

In order to solve these problems, we evaluated a number of CRM solutions and salesforce.com's solution had a strong functional fit. The fact that Salesforce is in the "Cloud" was more of an afterthought at the time, but turned out to be critical. We have an independent sales organization; worse than just not being on a single active directory, each office has their own preferences for what computers they use and how they set up their network. Not only would it have been complex and expensive to rollout an on-premise application but the burden of maintenance (especially with an application that needs to be upgraded several times a year) would have severely limited our ability to focus on actual business needs.

What were the results of the rollout?

Once we rolled out Salesforce, our prospect management and lead distribution processes changed completely. Salesforce gives us one place to maintain our prospect and customer information and track all our touch points with them. This is incredibly powerful because we're all working from the same information, can get a full view of the customer and can eliminate inefficient manual processes like our annual prospect book creation process. One very tangible example of this was something that happened recently. I needed to filter all our prospects by a specific set of criteria and get it out to our reps in each region. In the past, this
would've been an extensive process starting with collection of data from multiple different silos, to the development of numerous Excel sheets used to segment data by territory and ending with hundreds of emails flying around to the sales reps. With Salesforce, which already includes all of the relevant information, I was quickly able set the criteria and create reports by region that I could send directly our reps. What would've taken weeks took me hours - start to finish. Salesforce's reporting and built-in filtering capabilities are a lifesaver, in this and many other instances.

One of the interesting things that happened within our company is that the success we had with Salesforce in Sales and Marketing became infectious. Other departments saw how successful the Salesforce effort was and were begging to be a part of it. I've done my fair share of server-oriented programming in my career and I've never been part of a project that people begged to be a part of! We now use Salesforce across many of our core functions including: Sales and Marketing, Sales Resource Helpdesk, Telemarketing, Web Solutions and Recruiting.

As we've expanded our use of Salesforce internally at different departments, we're able to close the loop in terms of customer interactions: "Web2Lead" forms / Force.com Sites / Telemarketing / Helpdesk / Updates from the Editorial team ... Nearly every time a prospect or customer is touched by a member of the ThomasNet team, it's documented in Salesforce.

Salesforce has helped us generate a lot of savings but it also enables us to do things that we couldn't have done before. A great example of this the careers page that you guys built for us Without salesforce.com, we couldn't have built that careers page. Like most of us, our recruiting manager already has a full plate, the last thing he wanted was more work and managing content on a website certainly falls within that category. What really made http://careers.thomasnet.com a success is that is it is not only an applicant tracking system, but also a content management system. What this means is that as our recruiting manager manages current openings, the magic of Force.com Sites not only takes this structured data and auto-populates the website but the applications to those openings are automatically associated as well. With this detailed information, our qualified resume submissions went up 5X and it's transforming the way we recruit.

What has been your experience with Force.com, salesforce.com's platform for building custom applications?

In server-oriented programming, you always had to worry about scaling, it wasn’t enough to know what the initial audience was, you had to predict what the audience would look like several years down the road, before development even started. With salesforce.com’s software as a service (SaaS) offerings, we can focus on the business problems first, rather than worry about servers, hardware restrictions, databases and networks. This reduces our development time because we can start small and work more iteratively with the business. This alignment significantly reduces upfront costs and time-to-market.

In addition, we're almost “forced” into using best practices by using Force.com. When I previously approached business problems, I often found myself forced to treat each development request as its own distinct project, while this approach often met the stated needs of that project, it ended up putting both code and data into silos which didn’t meet business needs as a whole. With Force.com, while it will allow you to build silos and there’s very little you can’t do if you’re willing to bend the rules, there’s often a simple, point and click solution that meets most of your needs. The standardization on Force.com helps us define better solutions because we’re working with common development practices and a common set of business objects and workflows.

The other thing that's cool about a cloud platform like Force.com is that it's always improving and we get more and more new capabilities. It's not like older platforms where you have to upgrade to get the latest functionality or apply patches to get the latest security. With Force.com, we're always on the latest and greatest version.

My advice to anyone who's looked at salesforce.com and discounted it in the past is that you have to reevaluate it again. With the addition of APEX Code, Visualforce, Force.com Sites and more, the salesforce.com of a year or two ago is barely a shadow of what the Force.com platform is today.

Which applications would you say are best and least suited to the salesforce.com platform?

There are a number of areas that I think are particularly well suited to Salesforce. First off, Customer-facing processes are an obvious place to start. Applications or processes that you're currently using to interact with customers can typically be moved to Salesforce with great benefits. Sites has changed my philosophy about what Salesforce is suited for. Other than massive data processing, I'm not sure there's much it can't do. Any situation that requires an interaction between web and company data is now also a good fit, with the new Force.com Sites technology. Related to that, situations where you're collecting information from your users and displaying it back to them are also great fits for Salesforce, e.g., customer surveys, applicant forms, etc.

The only application that isn't particularly well-suited is large scale data processing. Salesforce is not a datawarehouse, or I should say, not yet anyway.

Please detail any unexpected benefits and challenges you came across during your implementation:

Unexpected benefits include how easy it was to expand Salesforce to different areas based on need - lots of synergy in terms of data and training, and automatic centralization of our key information. I also noticed synergy in our tool development, for example, a de-duplication tool we created for lead management worked seamlessly with our recruiting application as well.

In addition, salesforce.com's AppExchange has been a lifesaver, allowing us to take advantage of generic de-duplication tools and lead nurturing applications as packaged programs rather than trying to build our own custom apps.

Unexpected challenges were around the limitations we faced having to follow salesforce.com's development methodology since it's very structured. In the long run though, this challenge is minimized and far outweighed by the benefits realized via abiding to these structures.

What were the initial concerns upon your rollout?

First thing people are afraid of is a loss of control. There are also worries about downtime, but quite frankly, it's much less so than in a traditional IT environment. As much as I’d like to believe our IT department would respond to any problem 24/7/365, without a platform like Saleforce, it’s very rare to have that amount of support.

What would you recommend to those who are getting started with a transition to Salesforce?

(1) Getting started - You must have well-defined problems with well-defined defined solutions. Then you can move on to solving data management problems.

(2) Do the right things - Start small, pick a specific problem and solve it. Don't worry about how big it needs to be, with Salesforce, size and scalability aren’t issues. Don't over-engineer, keep adoption in mind as you move along.

Many thanks to Brian for a lively and insightful discussion. We're excited about many more of these and learning from you, our customers! If you'd like to be a part of this series, please leave a comment below or contact me directly.