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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
