November 04, 2008 : Appirio PS Essentials Leverages Salesforce.com's On-Demand Platform to Offer Core PSA Functionality at a Fraction of the Cost of Traditional Solutions
Note: As of Jan 1, 2011, Professional Services Enterprise, an application formerly provided by Appirio Inc. on Force.com, is now owned, developed and supported by FinancialForce.com.SAN FRANCISCO – Dreamforce 2008 – November 3, 2008 – Appirio (www.appirio.com) today announced Appirio Professional Service Essentials, a professional services automation (PSA) application built from the ground up on the Force.com platform. The new solution meets the needs of services companies and services teams within larger organizations by offering a better way to manage the unique dynamics of a business built around people ? and at 25-50 percent of the cost typically associated with other solutions.PS Essentials helps to automate and manage staffing, resource and portfolio planning, contractor utilization and more. By building on Force.com, PS Essentials inherits all the benefits of the fastest and easiest platform for building business applications, including security and sharing models, workflow, analytics, customization, integration and mobile access as well as the reliability, availability and global scale of salesforce.com's trusted infrastructure.Today's release of PS Essentials is the first product in a portfolio of offerings that Appirio will roll out over the next year to serve the $1 trillion U.S. services industry (U.S. Census Bureau), and the professional services industries which employs more than eight million people (Bureau of Labor Statistics). PS Essentials offers the core capabilities necessary for building, running and managing successful services projects. Future Appirio products will address even more aspects of services managment for a broader set of vertical and functional scenarios."Having run services for several public companies, I've seen first-hand the high cost, lack of flexibility and integration challenges that traditional solutions present to executives who want to create world class organizations," said Chris Barbin, CEO at Appirio. "Combining Force.com with Appirio's decades of collaborative experience in building and running successful services organizations provides a unique opportunity to truly re-think how service processes should function. There should be a much greater focus on improving collaboration and visibility which is the key to lowering operational costs, improving utilization and aligning services more closely with sales and other aspects of the business."PS Essentials solves the core needs of professional services firms at a fraction of the cost of traditional offerings. Because the solution builds on salesforce.com's Force.com platform it eliminates the need for customers to purchase their own expensive IT infrastructure, lowering both up-front and ongoing costs. PS Essentials also enables customers to get up and running quickly without getting locked into a solution that may not be right for them down the road. Existing Salesforce CRM customers get the added value of using this solution to help unify their sales and services businesses, which can improve win rates, client satisfaction and overall utilization.Appirio has been using early versions of PS Essentials to run its own business. "In just the last 12 months, our business has grown over 500 percent. We've significantly increased the size and reach of our delivery team and have added subcontractors to our resource pool," said Glenn Weinstein, co-founder and head of service delivery for Appirio. "The PS Essentials package has helped us scale quickly, and manage a high volume of daily resourcing activity with minimal administrative staff."
Pricing and Availability
Information on Appirio PS Essentials is now available today on the Force.com AppExchange or through Appirio's direct salesforce by contacting products@appirio.com. Standard pricing for Salesforce CRM users is $20 per user per month.
Useful Links and Resources
More information on Appirio's approach to service management
More information on Professional Service Essentials
Product demo
Appexchange listing
Appirio Professional Service Essentials will be showcased at Dreamforce 2008 in San Francisco in Appirio booth #487. Today at Dreamforce, Appirio also announced Appirio Adoption Accelerator, a customized help tab that accelerates the adoption of Salesforce CRM among businesses of all sizes. Visit http://www.appirio.com/dreamforce08/ for more information on both announcements and to learn where Appirio is speaking at the conference.
About the Force.com Platform and AppExchange
Force.com is the only proven Platform as a Service for building and running business applications in the cloud. The Force.com platform powers the Salesforce CRM applications, more than 800 ISV partner applications, and more than 85,000 custom applications used by salesforce.com's 47,700 customers such as Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE and Sprint Nextel. Force.com is the fastest platform for building and deploying complex business applications. Unlike a stack of disparate client/server hardware and software products, Force.com unifies the development and deployment model from the database to the device, allowing developers to easily assemble applications with clicks, components and code, and then instantly deploy them on salesforce.com's trusted global infrastructure. Customers and partners are using Force.com to build all kinds of business applications from supply chain management to compliance tracking, brand management, accounts receivable, claims processing applications and much more. Applications built on the Force.com platform can be easily distributed to the entire SaaS community through the Force.com AppExchange marketplace at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/.
About Appirio
Appirio (www.appirio.com) provides products and services that help enterprises accelerate their adoption of on-demand. Appirio has a proven track record of delivering business value to customers by implementing mission-critical Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions based on platforms such as Salesforce and Google Apps, and developing innovative applications that connect and extend today's leading on-demand platforms. Appirio was founded in 2006, is the fastest growing partner of salesforce.com and Google, and is backed by Sequoia Capital. Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc.