Appirio Selects NetApp as Cloud Pioneer of the Year

NetApp Team Honored for Use of Cloud Platforms to Transform Field Operations

San Mateo, Calif. - January 6, 2012 - Appirio announced today it has selected NetApp, Inc. as its Cloud Pioneer of the Year, an annual award given by Appirio to companies and individuals that demonstrate leadership in cloud computing initiatives. The award honors the team for the cloud-first approach they took to dramatically improve the Field Operation team’s ability to move fast and respond to the business’ evolving needs.

The NetApp team, led by its VP of worldwide sales ops, was selected from nearly a dozen other Appirio Cloud Pioneers representing companies such as BP, Brown-Forman, Glocap, Enterasys, Medtronic, Suntech and Yahoo!

“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, VP Worldwide Sales Operations, NetApp. “Cloud solutions provide a number of benefits that just aren’t possible with on-premise technologies and set us up for success in the future. 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.”

“The team at NetApp is a leading example of creative destruction - 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,” said Chris Barbin, CEO of Appirio. “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.”

The NetApp Cloud Pioneer Story
NetApp delivers storage and data management solutions that provide cost efficiency and accelerate business breakthroughs. As a company that prides itself on always finding ways to enable its customers to do things they couldn’t do before at a speed they never thought possible, NetApp strives for the same achievements for its own IT and business teams.

After gathering extensive employee feedback, the NetApp sales ops and IT teams combined resources to revamp their existing sales solution using Salesforce Sales Cloud, Eloqua and other cloud productivity apps.  Working with Appirio and its Cloud Management team, the NetApp 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.  Within a relatively short period of time, NetApp saw an improvement in the number of sales people 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.

NetApp continues to explore ways to leverage the cloud and Salesforce.com throughout its business, injecting a cloud-centric strategy into the NetApp IT Roadmap. They are exploring ways to use crowdsourcing and community development (CloudSpokes) for new applications, mobility solutions, Service Cloud, and social (Chatter) opportunities across the enterprise for both internal NetApp and external Partner users.

The Cloud Pioneer Award
Appirio’s Cloud Pioneer awards program was introduced in 2010 to recognize the champions and change agents among Appirio’s customers - those who recognize the benefits of public cloud platforms and drive projects that are not only successful but truly impactful for their organization. Each Cloud Pioneer award winner is chosen by Appirio’s leadership team, based on nominations from the company’s delivery managers and cloud architects.

Appiro’s 2011 Cloud Pioneer Award Recipients
Jane Vaillancourt and the NetApp team of Thomas Mirrione, Christopher Cho, Hiroaki Ajari, Cynthia Stoddard, Jessie McKay, Chandransu Choudhury, Anujit Sarkar, Shihling Liang, Rita Sair, Teresa Lacsina, Leslie Thiel, and Nimish Shah; Lee Anne Hanson (BP), Gary Spears (Medtronic), Vala Afshar and Dan Petlon (Enterasys), Adam Zoia and Christina Guerland (Glocap), Kristen Sanders (Yahoo!), Dr. Zhengrong Shi and Andrew Beebe (Suntech), Toby Lester (Brown-Forman)

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About Appirio
Appirio accelerates the cloud-powered business, helping enterprises achieve real results from cloud applications and platforms like salesforce.com, Google and Workday. Appirio has worked with more than 250 enterprise customers including organizations like City of Los Angeles, Facebook, Flextronics, Home Depot, International Hotels Group, Japan Post Network, Ltd., L'Oreal, NetApp, NYU, Starbucks, Thomson Reuters and VMware. Appirio's technology-enabled professional services are supported by a team of 400 cloud experts and CloudSpokes, a nearly 30,000 person-strong global cloud developer community. The company's expertise and innovative brokerage technology have been recognized by organizations such as the World Economic Forum, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, InformationWeek, Gartner, and IDC. Appirio has offices in the U.S., Europe and Japan, and is backed by Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital.