Appirio, which accelerates cloud-powered businesses and helps enterprises achieve real results from cloud applications and platforms like Salesforce.com, Google (News - Alert) and Workday, has selected NetApp as its Cloud Pioneer of the Year.
The Cloud Pioneer of the Year is an annual award given by Appirio to companies and individuals that demonstrate leadership in cloud computing initiatives. The award recognizes NetApp for its ability to use cloud platforms to transform field operations.
NetApp delivers storage and data management solutions offering cost efficiency and accelerating business breakthroughs. The company’s sales ops and IT teams combined resources to revamp their existing sales solution using Salesforce Sales Cloud, Eloqua (News - Alert) and other cloud productivity apps.
NetApp team, with support from Appirio and its Cloud Management team, modified its traditional waterfall approach to an agile methodology and created processes that would help keep pace with ever-changing business requirements, new sales needs, and evolution of cloud platforms.
As a result, the company saw a drastic improvement in the number of salespeople submitting their own forecast and a 95 percent adoption rate of the system, leading to improved user satisfaction, better lead conversion as well as improved forecasting and visibility, company officials said.
The NetApp team, led by its vice president of worldwide sales ops, was selected from nearly a dozen other Appirio Cloud Pioneers representing companies such as BP, Brown-Forman, Glocap, Enterasys (News - Alert), Medtronic, Suntech and Yahoo!, according to NetApp officials.
"Our IT decisions are focused on investing for both short-term and long-term benefits and cloud applications and platforms can fill both those needs," said Jane Vaillancourt, vice president of Worldwide Sales Operations, NetApp, in a statement.
Vaillancourt affirms that cloud solutions provide a number of benefits that aren’t possible with any on-premise technologies. “But to reap those benefits you need to rethink existing processes and skills. The end result can be dramatic, though, so I'm extremely proud of our team for its willingness to lead and explore new territory."
NetApp, according to Chris Barbin, CEO of Appirio, is a leading example of creative destruction because it saw the need to accelerate change, set a vision for how cloud technology could reinvigorate their processes, and have done an exceptional job executing on that vision.
"We introduced the Cloud Pioneer award to highlight teams who are powering their business with the cloud, and NetApp exemplifies this. We are privileged to work with them and all of our Cloud Pioneers," Barbin added.
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Rajani Baburajan is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Rajani's articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by Tammy Wolf