November 18, 2013 : Appirio recognized for its outstanding contribution toward customer success in second annual Salesforce.com Partner Innovation Awards
San Francisco Calif., November 18, 2013 – Appirio today announced it has been named the recipient of the Salesforce.com Partner Innovation Award for Platform by salesforce.com. In receiving this award, Appirio was recognized for its work with Virgin America in leveraging social and mobile cloud technologies from salesforce.com to accelerate customer company transformation. The award was presented at Dreamforce 2013, the world's largest vendor-led technology gathering, on Nov. 18 in San Francisco.
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"Appirio has been innovating on the Salesforce platform for more than seven years, helping enterprises utilize the the cloud to try new things and outperform their competition," said Glenn Weinstein, chief technology officer, Appirio. "Our work with Virgin America and the Force.com platform gave thousands of employees a better employee experience, putting mobile and social capabilities front and center. We are proud to be recognized for our Innovation in Platform two years in a row."
"The Salesforce.com Cloud Alliance partner ecosystem continues to play an important role in evangelizing the benefits of social and mobile cloud technologies from salesforce.com to accelerate customer company transformation," said Denzil Samuels, senior vice president, Alliances – Partner Account Management, salesforce.com. "We congratulate Appirio on its Salesforce.com Partner Innovation award in Platform and applaud their ongoing commitment to delivering customer success."
"With about 2,500 Teammates ? about 85 percent of whom work on board our planes or at our station locations ? sharing information and communicating effectively was difficult with a traditional content management-focused intranet without mobile functionality. And frankly our old Intranet no longer reflected the spirit of innovation behind the Virgin America brand," said Frances Fiorillo, SVP people and in-flight services at Virgin America. "Within one month of deploying our new, social intranet with the support of our partner Appirio, 80 percent of our Teammates had shared content via Chatter, a social collaboration tool, contributing to increased Teammate engagement."
With the majority of employees in the air or away from a desk, Virgin America needed a solution to help its Teammates get important information on-the-go. Its old intranet lacked overall usability and consistency from a user experience perspective, which hurt user adoption numbers. Appirio worked with Virgin America to create VXConnect, the company's Teammate portal built on Force.com. Now Virgin America Teammates ? even those who only occasionally pass through headquarters ? can access numerous applications and teams within VXConnect including: payroll, HR, finance, IT, team travel, Gmail, Crew Member Support, flight options and benefits–all through an engaging, custom branded and easy-to-use, social, mobile intranet.
The Salesforce.com Partner Innovation Awards is an annual awards program honoring salesforce.com's consulting partner ecosystem for the contributions they have made in helping customers leverage social and mobile cloud technologies to accelerate customer company transformation. Award winners were honored at salesforce.com's annual Dreamforce, the world's largest vendor-led technology gathering, held at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. This is the second consecutive win for Appirio in the "Innovation in Platform" category, last year for its work with Facebook.
Partner recipients of a Salesforce.com Partner Innovation Award were acknowledged in one of 7 categories based on their outstanding customer implementation work:
Innovation in Sales
Innovation in Service
Innovation in Marketing
Innovation in Platform
Innovation in Industry Solution
Innovation in Mobile Solutions
Customer Company Innovation
About AppirioAppirio is a global cloud consultancy that provides on-demand access to the world's top technical talent. Appirio's business and technology expertise, proven methodology, and its 600,000 member Topcoder and CloudSpokes crowdsourcing communities, enable customers to be more agile and see results in weeks or months, not years. Founded in 2006, Appirio is a trusted partner to more than 700 organizations around the world including Apria, Coca-Cola, eBay, Facebook, Japan Post Network, L'Oreal, NetApp, The Four Seasons and Virgin America.