This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

What’s your philosophy on maintaining a focus on innovation?

Maintaining a focus on innovation requires leveraging technology to do new things that couldn’t be done before. Making sure your team understands that is critical. Porting software from DOS to Windows and from Windows to the Cloud requires no new innovation. While some basic functionality maybe ported, the more innovative approach is taking the manual process that exists today and moving it to an automated process.

The Cloud has provided a whole new platform for innovation. The sharing of data and services between customers and partners creates lots of opportunities to automate processes by using technology in ways that it has never been used before. Innovation in the cloud is not about using the latest technology but instead it is about how a specific technology can vastly improve the day to day processes that we all have. You can’t deliver on innovation without a focus on customers, how they operate today and how to provide that leap forward that will transform their lives.

What do you do as CEO to keep your organization focused on customers and value?

I start with the basics. First we have an open environment where all the employees sit in a bullpen with no cubicles or offices. This allows information to flow from sales and customer service to marketing, product management and engineering. That constant energy between groups is where we see lots of collaboration focused around real customer pain points. In addition, we surround all the employees with customer testimonials and our core values painted on the walls. There is no escaping what we are focused on.

Great product management always starts with the customer. Whether it is a one on one conversation, a focus group or quantitative survey, the lessons learned are invaluable. Each of these is part of the fabric of how we do things. At a minimum, we screen for it when we hire and then we all lead by example; talking to customers and prospects whenever we can. Ultimately, when we are discussing strategies or product roadmaps, I always ask what does the customer think? As a result, employees understand our expectations and reflect this in their day to day work.

Finally, we offer stellar support. We love talking to customers via phone, chat and email. We build it into the application itself to encourage interaction with the customer and then we track customer satisfaction on every interaction. These numbers are reported weekly and monthly for all to see. Annually, we conduct a Net Promoter Survey where we take the data and use it to celebrate successes and evaluate areas of improvement with employees. I believe this is why we have an industry leading Net Promoter score in the mid 60′s.

This type of focus and innovation leads customers to say that they save 50 – 75% of the time it takes to manage the back office while getting paid 2 – 3 times faster.

In 2020, looking back on this decade, what will be the single most impactful technical advancement driving business growth?

I can remember hearing of the information economy as a kid and yet I think this will be the first decade where that phrase means something to everyone. At the core of the information revolution is the Cloud. At the core of the Cloud is Shared Data and it changes everything. It creates transparency across and between users and developers.

We have had central data before but the data was not shared. You only have to look at Facebook to see that people value transparency and are willing to give up some privacy to have better relationships and services. Extending the Shared Data concept to the business world will allow businesses to grow faster. It improves collaboration with their employees, their accountants, their customers and their suppliers, all in real time and accessible from anywhere. Being able to securely share payment information and documents between interested parties accelerates business transactions and overall growth. What is most exciting to me is that the applications of Shared Data have only just begun. By 2020, businesses and the world at large will be connected and doing things we never imagined.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware

This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

Given that the economic outlook in many parts of the world seems uncertain:
What’s your philosophy on maintaining a focus on innovation?

The software market is undergoing massive change driven by the rise of cloud computing. Last year only a third of all software was distributed online either as a digital download or as a service in the cloud. By 2014, this figure will climb to over 70%. This is a sea change in the world of software – a change that is making the software market even more competitive. The key to survival is continuous innovation. The winning software vendors will be those that can successfully transition to a “frictionless” self-service transaction model, rapidly expand to new channels and markets, and be agile in their response to market feedback.

At Avangate, innovation stands out as a critical component not only for our success, but for the success of our customers. For that reason, innovation and customer delight are constantly at the forefront of our minds and an integral part of our company values and processes. One example of how we keep the focus on innovation is providing our development team a day a week to work on ideas they want to champion – whether it’s a good idea they heard from a customer or an experiment with a new technology that has the potential to improve our platform capabilities. While some companies adopt a strategy of growth by acquisition, our strategy is to grow by innovation and excellent customer service.

How do you encourage and foster a growth mindset with your employees and partners?

Avangate helps software and SaaS companies market and sell their solutions online in exchange for a share of the revenue we generate. Our business model is therefore fundamentally based on the success of our customers. As such, we forge a strategic partnership with each of our customers, with Avangate’s mission being to grow their business. We monitor the growth of our customers very closely and set key objectives against which we measure ourselves weekly.

Because our growth is dependent on the success of our customers, we are insanely focused on helping our customers grow their business. Leveraging our deep expertise in the software and SaaS markets, we go beyond simple online transactions to open up new markets for our customers – whether international, eMarketplaces, or rapidly emerging software and SaaS niches. We also help our customers improve sales by leveraging the rich set of best practices we have accumulated through measuring sales data across our thousands of customers.

What do you do as CEO to keep your organization focused on customers and value?

As I mentioned before, our growth strategy is based on innovation and excellent customer service. A testament to our strong customer focus is our high client retention rate which in 2011, was an industry leading 98%. How have we been able to achieve that? Part of the answer is the strong customer loyalty program we have developed, but more importantly is the focus on customer service as one of our core company values.

As CEO, I take the time to speak to the entire company on a monthly basis. Along with updating the team on our achievements and progress against objectives, I make sure to call out key customer stories that highlight the value we provide and underscore the importance of making our customers truly happy. We regularly communicate with our customers to ask them how we are doing and how we can improve. Using metrics such as the Net Promoter Score, we set company-wide customer satisfaction objectives and regularly measure how we are doing against them.

As you look around the globe, which markets will provide the best opportunities for tech companies in the next five years? Why?

First, the software industry has extended its impact to nearly every industry. Coupled with the lowered barriers to entry enabled by selling online, opportunities are opening up for software companies to expand to new and emerging markets. The advent of software is transforming the automotive, healthcare, retail, government and financial industries, among many other industries. Both consumers and businesses are driving the need for software, and its use is showing no signs of slowing in the foreseeable future.

Second, with respect to what are the attractive geographic markets, we are seeing tremendous growth in the classic BRIC countries. We also see longer-term growth opportunities in the Middle East and Northern Africa. That said, one of the exciting things about the industry’s shift to cloud commerce is that it gives software and SaaS vendors the opportunity to distribute their solutions anywhere in the globe, anywhere there is demand. Avangate helps vendors make this transition to the cloud providing the deep localization capabilities to penetrate global markets, including local payment methods, currencies, ordering interface languages, and local shopper phone support.

With various forces combining to transform the IT landscape, how do you see the role of the IT department developing?

I see two mega-trends continuing to impact the world of IT. The first is the “Consumerization of IT” which is not only blurring the lines between consumer applications and business applications but also driving businesses to buy more and more like consumers. Perhaps we can thank Apple for ushering in this trend, but the growing expectation in the workplace is that business applications are as easy to procure and as easy to use as an iPad app. The second trend is the increasing importance for IT to align with the business. Technology is no longer under lock and key by the high priests of IT – technology is available to anyone thanks to cloud computing. Therefore, it is critical that IT shift from their traditional role as the keepers of technology to a business partner role focused on optimizing the use of technology, ensuring the infrastructure is available to leverage the technology, as well as integrating increasingly disparate solutions to achieve business results.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware

This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

What’s the future for hybrid cloud strategies?

The future of the hybrid cloud strategy is the all cloud strategy.

As Nicholas Carr will tell you in his very readable book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, the delivery of IT services is consolidating into centralized, utility-type organizations like today’s electric power utilities consolidated the 30,000+ independent electric power plants run by enterprises across the U.S. 100+ years ago.

After decades of many in the high tech industry talking about utility or grid computing, we are finally approaching the day when enterprise CEO’s will no longer be burdened with the difficult decisions of upgrading major ERP systems or making enormous capital expense decisions and hiring armies of people to run their underlying IT infrastructure. They will be able to look to their cloud utility service providers for much of what they are obligated to run today.

Before we arrive at this attractive future vision however, there is a migration and a long, often arduous path ahead. In some cases, it will be fraught with danger as enterprises cross the chasm to true utility computing and centralized IT services. That chasm is the hybrid cloud where enterprises are operating some applications in their own data centers, some at third party hosting centers, some purchased as complete end-to-end application service (e.g., salesforce.com), and balancing a variety of other types of hybrid operating models.

Just like the hybrid automobile, for example the Prius, helped us migrate from fossil fuels to battery operated, electrical cars, there is a very lucrative business during this interim hybrid phase of our industry evolution and it will extend for a while.

Many of our clients are telling us that they fear that the transition to this hybrid cloud state will introduce lack of control and visibility resulting in business, operating, and regulatory risks of concern. Similar to what car manufactures like Toyota did when they launched the Prius, by going overboard to make sure that the batteries last longer than any other component of a conventional car, I believe that those who are enabling this IT transition should proactively address the fear of lack of visibility and control during the hybrid stage as we head towards our desired future vision.

Of course some believe not all IT assets or applications will migrate to the Cloud and the same was true for power generation a hundred years ago. Many buildings, for example, have back up power generators today. Ultimately, however, there is a massive capacity utilization gain, economies of scale, and best practices benefits to be gained from the migration of IT assets and services to the Cloud. The real wins will be towards the end point.

While your hybrid strategy should be thoughtful and lucrative, its future lies in the 100% Cloud model.

With various forces combining to transform the IT landscape, how do you see the role of the IT department evolving?

The evolving role of the IT department may be at one of the most interesting stages of this function’s history.
Given the migration of enterprise IT operations and data center operations to centralized outsourced providers or application providers, the IT professional has an opportunity to raise the bar of their role at their companies. Instead of being bogged down with lots of the administrative work associated with managing infrastructure or addressing device level performance, the IT professional now has an opportunity to focus her efforts on how to leverage IT resources and applications to make a real impact on an organization, to be a game changer!

Many of our clients are currently shifting the IT role in two ways: (1) IT is increasing its ability to relate and deliver directly to business improving activities and (2) the IT professional is migrating into more of a project management role on the execution side.

While many large enterprise organizations are hiring MBAs to help with this first shift, I believe this may be a temporary fad. There is enormous value in having someone who understands the IT process and capabilities interface with the business users and it seems to me the MBAs would be the business users. Regardless, the IT professional does have an opportunity to evolve, moving up a series of stages of relationship to the overall business that the CIO Executive Council has defined as migrating from Service Provider to IT Partner to Business Peer and ultimately to Game Changer.

CIOs will continue to broaden their conversation at the management team level and bring more strategy to bear. They will spend less time worrying about daily operations that their vendors are managing and focus on how to best leverage those resources to move the dial on key performance metrics of the business – not of the devices deep in the guts of the IT utility.

On the execution side, IT professionals will need to get better and better at managing vendors, negotiating costs, facilitating the collaboration and implementation of these various vendors.
While all jobs have some “grunt work” associated with them, none are as lucky as the enterprise IT professional whose seeing the grunt taken out of their work and the interesting stuff ramping up like crazy!

Rock on!

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA Software Division on Twitter @SIIASoftware

This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

With various forces combining to transform the IT landscape, how do you see the role of the IT department evolving?

The Complex Road to Business/IT Nirvana
The Application is the Business. And, the Business is the Application.

For companies that grasp and internalize the above, the road to Business/IT Nirvana becomes crystal clear. What is an application, really? It can be interpreted different ways by different people with different job functions. But at the most fundamental level, an application should be the business – and if it’s not, then that application is probably weakening the business.

IT spent the last 10 years trying to align itself with Business – until last year. The economic downturn blew up the alignment myth. CEOs told their CIOs “You have no IT goals. IT goals are the business goals.” Simple. Crisp. Total Alignment. But what’s the best way to help ensure that your applications are the business and vice versa? The goal of aligning IT to business goals is not new – it has been around for many years, and remains a ‘nirvana’ that organizations strive to achieve. In an October 2011 report by Forrester Research, Inc. titled “Transform Your I&O Organization Into an Innovation Machine,” report author Jean-Pierre Garbani writes, “In Partner Player organizations, technology and its leaders are viewed as critical to go-to-market offerings and provide a source of differentiation (the business is IT and IT is the business). ”

Once Business and Applications are indistinguishable, risks to Applications are nothing but risks to the Business. This is an exciting time in business and technology. Private, public and hybrid clouds enable and support sensational new business capabilities. People are recognizing the differentiation Garbani notes, and want to more quickly align their IT capabilities and their business successes. Why? Consider a recent study by Aberdeen that found that 68 percent of the time, IT finds out about application issues from end-users. Enterprise Management Associates estimates that the amount of outages and application problems averaged out across mid-market and enterprise size operations cause 60 hours of downtime per year. The cost of that downtime is averaged at $45,000 per hour (much higher for enterprises of course), and businesses spend nearly $3 million a year identifying and solving application issues in the cloud. ‘What’s so exciting about that?’ you’re asking. Well, never before have tools and methodologies been so available to propel IT transformation from IT centric to business centric. Today’s solutions assess and view critical business metrics, in a repeatable and highly consistent manner, providing enormous insight to leverage and work more successfully with cloud computing technology.

So, why are we still using system metrics as a proxy for business risks? We should not. The primary metrics should be application metrics that are synonyms for business metrics like ‘Sales in Past 5 minutes’. Traditional system metrics (like Network Latency) are still essential, but they now serve to support root cause analysis of business risks. Today, finally, there are solutions that provide critical business visibility through the technical operations. These tools can show not only that IT metrics are the business metrics, but that application metrics are business metrics. And I believe that companies that embrace this thinking will be successful.

This insight is elevating the responsibilities of CTOs and CIOs. They have always held responsibility for the vision and execution of a company’s IT organization, but today they are at the business table. This is a fundamental shift that has been evolving and which is well underway today. Finally, IT is no longer an ‘expense bucket’ but a true business peer. When asked what the IT goals are, the answer is “business goals” – they are, and should be, one and the same. IT departments at today’s successful businesses ensure everyone within IT has specific alignment in their roles with responsibility to those business goals. Whether an employee is a Sys Admin or in Dev Ops, the next generation IT operation has a clearer understanding of the department’s end-to-end alignment to the business goals, and just as critical, a way to measure it. But how does a company or organization get from start-up chaos to business/IT hand-in-hand nirvana? They need to recognize that it’s a process and have the right tools in place to know where they’re at in the process and how to keep business and IT metrics continually aligned.

Where Are We, How Did We Get Here, and What’s Next? The Complexity Challenge

Having trivialized alignment as a red herring worth completely ignoring, let’s get back to reality. There is no silver bullet to immediate “Total Alignment.” We learned early on that businesses have a natural progression in terms of their business model and alignment with IT. No one moves quickly or painlessly from ‘survival mode’ of look-guess-fix-repeat to an operation where IT and business goals are fully aligned, where IT and business metrics are harmonious, and where business and IT are working hand-in-hand to manage business risks. Through our close work with customers, we have identified five stages of a business risk ‘maturity model’ – starting with ‘Survival’, then moving up to Reactive, Planning, Proactive, and finally full Alignment of business and IT. Forrester has recognized this progression also. The January 2012 report: “Develop An IT Service Management And Automation Strategic Plan” identifies it as a ‘Complexity Curve’ – companies moving along the curve transition from one state to the next. In the beginning they’re focused on applications and infrastructure, then as the business grows, so grows the number of applications, then the applications become more complex services, and then finally become integrated with the business. Both of these models help companies identify their current stage of business/IT alignment, and also help guide businesses and IT departments through the challenging path of progression to complete business/IT alignment.

Successful organizations such as Etsy and Zynga have already merged the idea of business and IT performance as one and the same. They have helped the world understand how this can be done. We now have platforms and services that emulate these leaders and allow all of us to reach that nirvana. A place where IT risks are nothing more than business risks. A place where an IT application is the business. And, IT goals are nothing but business goals.

Businesses and organizations cannot evolve from survival mode to business/IT nirvana quickly and still focus on running a successful operation. But today there is a platform and tools available that are easily optimized for any organization at any stage of progression toward business/IT nirvana. The successful business will take advantage of these capabilities to ensure that the application is the business, and the business is the application.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware

This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

What’s your philosophy on maintaining a focus on innovation?

At AppDirect, we believe that one of our company’s greatest strengths is our innovative culture. From our developers to our leadership team, nurturing creativity is at the core of our company philosophy. As we rapidly expand our team, our focus on cultivating innovation is the key factor behind our recruiting and hiring process success.

There is little doubt that recruiting and retaining top performers in the technology industry is more challenging than ever. While there is a competitive hunt for talent, hiring candidates simply based on prestigious education or big name experience will ultimately fail. Employers must look beyond a candidate’s talent and consider if a person would be a cultural fit within the company. But in many organizations, culture is neither meticulously developed nor defined in the recruiting process.

Culture instead must be intentionally shaped to define the working norms and processes of an organization. Setting the right cultural infrastructure is what separates scalable start-ups from small businesses. Founders must be deliberate in establishing the cultural DNA and training team members to recruit based on a defined set of cultural values.

To implant culture into the recruiting process, brainstorm key ideas and define how those values can be converted into hiring criteria. Define your interview process, clearly mapping out each component and how it relates to your business and culture objectives. Your interview process should allow you to “test” for the values rather than have candidates simply regurgitate résumé bullet points.

We have defined our cultural values and created criteria to score potential candidates. Our company hires based on six core values: positive mental attitude, humility, true north, ownership, communication and intensity. Candidates are evaluated for these values using a four point scale, where four exceeds expectations and one is below expectations. Any candidate that falls below a two in any of the values will not be hired. The interview process then assesses these values. For example, to measure communication, candidates are given 5-10 minutes to present on any topic they’re passionate about. This gives us an opportunity to gauge the candidate’s passion and communication style. The responses have been incredibly engaging and entertaining with a wide range of subject matters that allow us to see the candidates’ passions shine.

We also put would-be hires through a rigorous set of interviews to ensure they can maintain their intensity throughout the process. All candidates have a minimum of three rounds of meetings each of which last at least two hours and involve different staff members across business disciplines. This process ensures that candidates present consistently in different situations and that you’re ultimately hiring someone who can maintain their level of excitement and focus when presented with challenging situations.

By focusing on cultural fit versus resume strength, we are attracting employees who want to work for a company that focuses on the bigger picture, allowing us to secure long term talent and foster innovation.

The technology industry can be intensely competitive, and start-ups in particular need people that will continue through all the obstacles. From day one you need people that will remain positive and inspire others on the team to become better. Defining shared values early on in the company is a critical step to ensuring your team can carry out the vision. Those values can be refined over time and will set up the company’s evolutionary path. Deliberately shaping a cultural DNA enables you to attract talent that reflects your culture and understands the value of innovation.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware

This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

In 2020, looking back on this decade, what will be the single most impactful technical advancement driving business growth?

It’s clear to me that mobility will be the single most impactful technical advancement driving business growth in the next ten years … and that’s because mobility has been the single most impactful technical advancement in our personal lives over the past ten years.

Mobility is impacting humanity even faster than the web did. Think about it: there are 7 billion people on the planet, and 1.5 billion of them are on the web. But 5 billion of them have mobile phones! The reach of mobile phones is phenomenal – more than three times the reach of the internet even today.

Last Christmas more than half of all adults used their mobile phones to help them make decisions about in-store purchases. People now use mobile apps more minutes per day (94 minutes) than they browse the web (72 minutes). And we can interact with mobile devices in ways we could never interact with the web through features like touch, motion, and voice controls (welcome to my world, Siri!).

As you think about how much mobile has changed your personal life, it’s barely touched how businesses operate. The current trend of “bring your own device to work” underscores how much business has not tapped the power of mobile … workers would rather pay for and use their own devices at work than be hobbled by the current mobile options provided by their employers.

Mobile in the enterprise is unfolding in two stages: the first is improving existing business processes by mobilizing information and providing it to the employee or customer at their moment of need. For example, a salesperson walks into a client meeting carrying a mobile device equipped with all the account information, a complete order history, understanding of available inventory, and most current price list for that customer. Or a doctor has walks into an exam with all the pertinent patient information at his fingertips including x-rays, MRIs and other visual items. This acceleration of information enables faster, better decision making.

The second stage is where apps utilize all of the interactions and contextual elements that that mobile device and cloud can provide … such as hyper-location, the customer’s previous buying behavior, and the condition and location of perishable inventory. Imagine a mobile application that provides a vice president of sales a real-time performance metric of where his sales people are and their performance in the accounts they are visiting, enabling him to shift sales/pricing strategies on the fly, to close a higher percentage of business. Or imagine a packaged goods company sending a 25% off coupon to a customer who is browsing the frozen food aisle of a grocery store, encouraging them to switch from a competitor’s product.

We are in the early days of companies tapping the power of mobile to improve business processes. Mobile will be even more transformative to business than the web was.

What’s the future for hybrid cloud strategies?

Mobile + Cloud = More than the Sum of Their Parts

Two of the most powerful trends in technology are converging into the mobile cloud. Mobile provides massive reach through billions of devices, while the cloud offers the ability to scale quickly. The strengths of both of these elements combine to create a result that is larger than the sum of their parts … mobile devices provide massive volumes of contextual information while the cloud is able to store, manage, and interpret this massive data.

Cloud-based services also enable enterprises to rapidly integrate functionality, such as check-ins, photos, authentication, and storage to their mobile applications, and then scale those functions rapidly. Enterprises only pay for the cloud capacity they utilize, as opposed to building up servers or storage that may lay unused for long periods of time. Given the current rapid adoption of new apps and innovation of new features, it’s nearly impossible for an enterprise to plan for infrastructure to support. The cloud provides maximum and immediate flexibility to scale mobile applications.

By combining both mobile and the cloud, enterprises can transform their relationships with customers and further empower their workforces with flexible, device-optimized applications, quickly and easily.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware

This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

In 2020, looking back on this decade, what will be the single most impactful technical advancement driving business growth?

Looking back on this decade which started deep in a global recession, the importance of understanding the true financial picture of an operation became critical. Companies of all sizes needed the ability to conduct more what-if analysis, get real-time analytics, and operate with greater agility than they had in growth times. With these economic conditions in mind, two important technological advancements, cloud computing and mobile, have gained leadership as the platform for managing a company. Realoperational management expands beyond the finance department to planning and analysis across all aspects of a company.

Structural changes in our global economy and the way we communicate are presenting a perfect storm for cloud and mobile to intersect. These two powerful platforms are disrupting the technology landscape and will prove to be the single most impactful advancement over the next eight years. The trend has already begun. Now all individuals need is an internet connection to access cloud applications anywhere and at any time. Couple cloud applications with mobile devices and this technology intersection will truly transform the way we live and work.

The explosion of tablets will drive increased demand for Corporate Performance Management (CPM) and a host of other applications necessary for business productivity in an increasingly complex, inter-related and uncertain economy. As conditions require daily access to key metrics, managers and executives will increasingly rely on dashboards and reports to access this information from anywhere and on any device, so they can operate effectively and make decisions swiftly. Either one of these trends discussed here, cloud and mobile, is capable of significant transformation, but the confluence of these technological platforms will disrupt the market as pressure to cut costs and make faster decisions continues to loom in this period of economic uncertainty.

What do you do as CEO to keep your organization focused on customers and value?

At Adaptive Planning we have built a customer centric organization by hiring people who are focused on customer success, by measuring success through metrics that matter to the customer, not just the bottom line, and by building an organization that is truly customer centric. As a SaaS provider our business is dependent on our customers renewing and continuing to expand their relationships with us. The value we deliver is critical. As a result, we continually seek product feedback in the form of Customer User Groups, online forums, annual surveys, and customer support cases.

Adaptive Planning’s product development roadmap is not based solely on what strategy our executive team has come up with, but rather is a direct result of the requests and product feedback from our customers. Our primary objective is to build the best product that we can that will meet the complex and varied needs of our customers, so they can benefit in their professional lives and transform how they strategically impact their organizations.

Because we are a SaaS vendor, we are able to monitor customer usage activity, proactively reach out to customers before their renewal period, and provide open access to executive management. This customer driven culture has earned us stripes in the form of #1 in customer satisfaction awards and more importantly renewals. In addition, our satisfied ecosystem of customers is a self-perpetuating community and we benefit from frequent introductions and referrals.

Social media and social business are big themes for 2012. In which areas of business will the social movement have the most impact (or most potential for impact)? Why?

The broad technological shift towards the social enterprise is an important one. Collaboration and the consumerization of the enterprise are critical trends that are impacting how employees communicate and operations function. As the social enterprise explodes going forward, collaboration capabilities in any cloud application will be critical. The recent political movements in the Middle East propelled by the advent of mobile and social platforms signals that this transformation is only just beginning and is reaching further than first world economies.

Corporate performance management processes-including budgeting, forecasting and reporting-are some of the most collaborative processes in business. At Adaptive Planning, we have been a leader in embedding collaborative capabilities into our SaaS CPM solution from day one. By harnessing these collaborative capabilities, finance, management and executive teams are better able to evaluate the feedback, input, and current thinking of numerous people throughout the organization-resulting in better informed decisions that drive real competitive advantage.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware