Run Your Professional Services Business in the Cloud - Dreamforce 2009 Session

Overview: Traditional enterprise applications focus on inventory and transactions, not the people and projects at the heart of a services organization. In this session, a top-tier services organization will show how managing services resource planning with Appirio's PS Enterprise product helped grow its business by getting the right people on the right projects for successful delivery to customers.

Narinder Singh, Appirio
Ken Leiserson, Convio

Chatter Matters: Social PS Enterprise

Narinder Singh

Today I had an opportunity to present the next generation of our Professional Services (PS) Cloud solution, Social PS Enterprise, with Marc Benioff on stage at Dreamforce. For the last six months, we've toured around discussing PS Enterprise with great response from customers - VP of Services, Services Ops and Managers and Consultants. Our message - tying together sales with professional services, providing full end-to-end processes to manage your people, customers, projects and numbers, and ability to easily scale with a powerful underlying platform - resonated with an industry ill-served by traditionally manufacturing-centric enterprise systems.

Yet in many of the pundit conversations we've been asked why build on Force.com. Aren't we worried about losing control over the underlying platform our entire application relies on? Today, more than any other, explains the power of building on top of cloud platforms. In a single announcement, a single release, Appirio's Professional Services Enterprise Solution will become "Social." Because Force.com is a true multi-tenant cloud platform, an addition by salesforce.com to that platform (in this case chatter), allows all customer apps and ISV solutions to inherit those same capabilities.

Professional Services have always been social, their systems just haven't been able to handle a conversation
Many of our customers had asked for capabilities like these. They did not always use words like "social business apps" or "twitter" but often contrasted their business life with how Facebook, Twitter or the web work. Because people are at the very core of their businesses, services firms are always looking for ways to work better together and make better, data-driven, decisions. Their interests are in actions like improving utilization, making better staffing decisions, taking advantage of new information and knowledge across their organizations. Professional Services Automation (PSA) solutions are traditionally the domain of the administrative and financial team of a services business. Consultants only interact with a PSA application to enter time or file expenses - low value-added activities.

The success or failure of a professional services team depends on how effectively consultants and others work together. Today, that engagement happens through email, IM, phone conversations and spreadsheets/documents - all completely disconnected from the business systems of a company. Why does this disconnect matter? Because islands of collaboration without business context can be misguided. And business process without collaboration is a shell of what really drives action in an organization.

The solution: Social Services Management

Now enterprise applications, our PS Enterprise being the first, can become social-- allowing a conversation between business events like pipeline, projects and financials, and people. We've been able to add dozens of features and use cases with limited or even no additional development because of the addition of the chatter platform. Systems can chatter important updates (my project end date has changed), and people can have conversations about those changes (staffing adjustments, sending out an invoice, asking about a press release) with the context of data from their systems. (Click here to see Social PS Enterprise in action)

Join the conversation by leaving us comments with your impressions of chatter!

Appirio and PS Village launch the Professional Services Cloud "Ask the Experts" Series

Over the past few months, Appirio has been honored and excited to become a part of PSVillage, which is a fantastic community of professional services leaders. Our discussions with the PSVillage community confirmed what we've believed for a while - that we, as an industry, have not been well supported by traditional enterprise applications. If we are using a solution today, it was most likely selected by some other group (Finance or IT). The reality for most of us is that we're managing our operations using legacy and custom-built solutions, with lots of painful spreadsheet workarounds. This is 2009, we have an enormous amount of technology at our finger tips, but there has been very little innovation for services teams. We have seen the paradigm shift from on-premise to the cloud for the Sales and Support teams. Why not professional services?

Appirio was founded in 2006 to help enterprises accelerate their adoption of the cloud. We currently serve over 2,500 organizations and are proud to have worked with many of salesforce.com and Google Enterprise's largest customers. We also practice what we preach-- we run our entire business in the cloud. We spend less than 2% of our revenue on IT, and have grown from 5 to 150 employees with no changes in the size of our IT team or capital investment. Best of all, we're able to focus on what matters most to every services business, people and customers, rather than on IT infrastructure.

Since we'd like every professional services firm to experience the same benefits we've experienced, we're working with PSVillage on a series of "Ask the Expert" events to help professional services firms take advantage of the cloud:

• First, check out our white paper-- it answers the question: "What is cloud computing, and why is it relevant to professional services?"
• Second, join us for a webinar on how you can build a business-case-driven roadmap to the cloud

We want to have a conversation with you about how cloud computing can help you achieve your business objectives. In order to tailor the conversation, please take 5 minutes to fill out this 10 question survey. We'll use this to tailor our content going forward and will of course share the results with you here and in our upcoming webinar.

We look forward to continuing the conversation here and in PSVillage!

UPDATE: View the webinar recording here...

Professional Services in the Cloud

We had a great webinar with Mike Fauscette of IDC last week. The topic, of course, was professional services in the cloud. Mike discussed industry trends that are driving demand for services resource planning (SRP) solutions that go far beyond traditional professional services automation and we demonstrated how we’re making this vision a reality with our PS Enterprise solution. If you missed the webinar, you can watch a recording here.

We had over 300 people register and 120 attend our event. Thanks to all who attended and registered. We enjoyed the lively discussion and will follow-up over the next few days with a Q&A post addressing the questions we missed during the session.

As part of the webinar we conducted a few polls which reinforced two of our core beliefs about this market.

1) Professional services firms have been under-served by traditional software

We'd long suspected that many professional services firms were running their businesses off spreadsheets but even we were a bit surprised by this. It's clear from looking at this that traditional ERP and PPM software are ill-suited to the needs of professional services firms. Netsuite/Openair/Quickarrow has achieved decent traction with their SaaS PSA solutions but the vast majority of companies are still running their businesses on in-house solutions or less.

2) Services firms are finding that their custom apps/spreadsheets are increasingly brittle foundations on which to build their businesses

Given the number of companies running on spreadsheets or custom applications, this chart isn't too surprising. If a company is running on spreadsheets, scaling is a major challenge and manual processes take away from all important billable hours, leading to dissatisfaction. Similarly if companies are running custom applications, scaling requires new hardware investments, and changes to reflect new practice areas, rei, etc. all require coding, again leading to dissatisfaction.

2) Professional services firms are aggressively adopting cloud solutions

After the doom and gloom of the first two charts, it's good to see some hope on the horizon. Professional Services firms are ahead of the curve in terms of both adopting and piloting cloud applications and infrastructure. 98% of people who attended our webinar had at least some familiarity with cloud computing and over 70% are actively adopting it. We've long believed that professional services firms are a perfect fit for the cloud because of their people and IP-based businesses, distributed workforces and desire to focus on core competencies. This data affirms our belief.

Summary

Services are a large and growing part of the global economy, but have not been well supported by enterprise technology. The reality is that most firms, especially larger services firms, are
managing their operations using legacy and custom-built solutions, with
lots of painful spreadsheet workarounds. Building applications, custom or on spreadsheets, should not be core strategic differentiators for a services businesses. This is a distraction, at best, from focusing on developing people and delighting customers.

Solutions such as Appirio's PS Enterprise, that are built on extensible, scalable cloud platforms enable services teams to focus on what's most critical - getting the right people on the right projects for successful delivery to customers.

Welcome to The Professional Services Cloud

By Todd Bursey

Welcome to the Professional Services Cloud Blog. With today's introduction of Appirio Professional Services (PS) Enterprise, the large enterprise release of our product to manage a professional services business, we wanted to deepen a dialog with the services community on how to run the services business of the future, today.

In our view, though services are a large and growing part of the global economy, they have not been well supported by enterprise technology. Traditional business applications are centered on inventory and transactions, not the people and projects at the heart of services organization. And silo’d PSA applications have been a failure– NetSuite has acquired two in the last year that after a decade had virtually no real market penetration outside of the SMB. Most services teams, especially larger services teams, are still using legacy and custom-built solutions, with lots of painful spreadsheet workarounds. There’s got to be a better way.

Industry analysts are predicting rapid growth for a category of solutions they’re calling “Service Resource Planning.” The idea is to do for the services industry what ERP did for manufacturing. But unlike ERP, everyone agrees that SRP will be built and delivered on a modern, cloud-based infrastructure. Services firms are already aggressively adopting cloud-based solutions for CRM – over 6000 professional services companies already use Salesforce CRM. But what about the core operations of a services business?

That's what we're calling the “Professional Services Cloud.” -- it's what you get when you combine Salesforce’s Sales Cloud and Service Cloud with a solution like PS Enterprise from Appirio to put the right people on the right projects for successful delivery to your customers. It’s the perfect platform for Services Resource Planning.

With the Professional Services Cloud blog, we'll explore what the professional service cloud means for your services organization. Our authors have decades of experience managing thousands of consultants at places like Accenture, McKinsey, Mercer, Borland, SAP, salesforce.com, Siebel and webMethods. We'll focus on the core the pillars of every services business– your people, your projects, your customers, and your numbers. We've seen how the Professional Services Cloud can drive higher, more predictable utilization & services margin, revenue growth from a single view into your customers, and benefits to the people side of your business as well-- our goal will be to help you see the same results.

We look forward to an exciting dialogue with the community, in future blogs we look forward to discussing:

• How to go from art to science - Process Best Practices
• Has anyone done this before? - Interviews with customers and thought leaders
• Are we measuring the right stuff? - Professional Services Metrics
• How to focus on what you are good at - Utilize the Cloud to manage your business

Coming Soon!

We will be launching our new Professional Services Cloud blog on Tuesday August 25th. Stay tuned!