Appirio Cloud Pioneers

Appirio has helped more than 500 leading enterprises implement, build and manage mission critical cloud solutions, and more than 5,000 companies use Appirio's products. We are privileged to work with the most forward-thinking companies and individuals.

We launched the Appirio Cloud Pioneer award program to help recognize and highlight the top thought leaders and influencers among our customers. Appirio’s Cloud Pioneers are chosen by our leadership team based nominations from our field teams. Cloud Pioneers represent the individuals who championed and drove their company's adoption of cloud solutions.

We are proud to call these individuals our customers.

2012 Winners

John Berisford, Executive VP, Human Resources

Maryellen Valaitis, SVP Human Resources

Michelle Ferguson, SVP Finance Excellence and Quality

Chris Kulczytzky, VP, Global Enterprise Systems & Infrastructure Delivery

Mary Beth Drake, VP, HR Services and Planning

Beverly Mate, VP HR Operations
2012 Pioneers of the Year

McGraw-Hill is a leading global financial information and education company. To generate business certainty and improve shareholder value, McGraw-Hill decided to divest of its Education Division, and rebrand itself as McGraw-Hill Financial, a high-growth, high-margin benchmarks, content and analytics company in the global capital and commodities markets driving $4.4B in revenue in 2013.

This transaction marked a transformative time for the company, shareholders, customers and employees of McGraw-Hill and the sale of the Education division gave the company considerable balance sheet flexibility, including the ability to make strategic acquisitions to enhance their portfolio. However, in order to take advantage of these opportunities, McGraw-Hill needed to complete the divestiture and move 6,000 employees from the Education division to an independent HCM system by Q4 2012. The team of John Berisford, Maryellen Valaitis, Michelle Ferguson, Chris Kulczytzky, Mary Beth Drake and Beverly Mate worked with Appirio from strategy to deployment of Workday HCM to align business process transformation, change management and overall user adoption.

John Corrigan, Assistant VP of New Business Ventures

ACT is a nonprofit organization focused on helping people achieve lifelong education and workplace success. With several corporate initiatives aimed at better understanding the urgency of education and workplace success in today’s world and helping individuals embrace the opportunity to advance their lives, John Corrigan was tasked with creating a better customer experience across the board at ACT. In partnering with Appirio to create a single view of the customer on the Salesforce platform, John is driving impactful and transformational changes within the organization to make ACT the premier lifelong partner for career success.

James Szmak, Chief Operating Officer

Sridhar Thodupunoori, VP, Information Technology

Robert Swanson, AVP, IT Operations

JDRF is a charitable organization dedicated to funding type 1 diabetes research (T1D). With a mission of improving the lives of all people affected by T1D by accelerating progress on the most promising opportunities for curing, better treating, and preventing T1D, the organization is reliant on donors and supporters to achieve its mission. In an effort to support all constituents in the T1D community, James Szmak, Sridhar Thodupunoori and Robert Swanson led the efforts to partner with Appirio to use the Salesforce platform to streamline communications with donors and volunteers, provide a more user friendly event and fundraising experience and enable patients and families to support each other and share experiences via a collaborative community environment.

Juan Montes, Chief Technology Officer
Diana Pan, Director of Technology

The Museum of Modern Art, located in midtown Manhattan, is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world. As a leader and innovator in the art world, MoMA wants to focus on the art and the experience members and guests have when they visit the museum. They don’t want to focus on maintaining systems and managing IT infrastructure. As a result, MoMA, led by Juan Montes and Diana Pan, has instituted a “cloud first” IT policy. In partnership with Appirio, MoMA has moved to take advantage of both the Salesforce and Google Apps platforms, and along the way has improved internal communication and collaboration, as well as provided a mobile check-in and more targeted personal experience for museum members.

Nick de Porcel, Head of Global Compensation/Benefits/HRIS/HROPS/Mobility
Christopher Ford, Assoc. Director HRIS, HR Ops, HR Compliance & Payroll

With $20 billion in assets and more than 1, 500 employees, SVB Financial Group provides commercial, international and private banking through 34 locations worldwide. As an influential leader in the industry, SVB has been ranked among America’s Best Banks by Forbes Magazine and Fortune considers SVB one of the best places to work. To keep pace with these accolades, SVB wanted to establish efficient global business processes and communication across international divisions, while meeting strict HR compliance requirements driven by the Financial Services industry. To do so, Nick de Porcel and Christopher Ford partnered with Appirio to deploy Workday Global HCM, Benefits, and Absence and Performance Management, giving employees greater visibility into their HR records and significantly increasing process efficiency and organizational productivity, while mitigating HR compliance risks and eliminating manual tasks. Transformational advances that will ensure SVB will be a best place to work for years to come.

Celia Stokes, EVP & Chief Marketing Officer
Diane Conley, VP Marketing Operations and Technology

K12’s mission is to develop each child's full potential with engaging, individualized learning by making curriculum available through full-time public and private school programs, worldwide through its online private school, and via individual courses for supplemental needs or homeschooling. For parents, making decisions about their child’s education is not something taken lightly and is often an emotional decision that comes with intense research, thought and planning. K12 strives to provide a warm, relevant and personal customer experience at every touchpoint, which is why Celia Stokes and Dianne Conley engaged Salesforce and Appirio to build a platform that enabled them to transform the customer experience by providing families with access to enrollment and customer care professionals for guidance and support. Through the partnership, enrollment agents now have complete visibility into the enrollment process, can identify at which stage a prospective student is at in the application process and can proactively advise the family through this difficult decision.

Erik Viens, EVP of Technology & CIO
Travis Smith, IT Project Manager

The Academy of Art University, the largest art and design school in the United States, is a for-profit university in San Francisco, California with an enrollment of over 18,000 students. With classes held in over 40 buildings located AAU provides a private transit system to shuttle students between campus buildings. However, the transit system was unreliable and challenging to navigate and with students constantly on the go, it was difficult for them to access up-to-the-minute info on the go. Cue Erik Viens and Travis Smith, who spearheaded efforts to improve service offerings to students with the help of Appirio. AAU now provides a mobile app downloadable through iTunes or GooglePlay, built on the Force.com platform, that has transformed the tudent experience, allowing students to access real-time updates for transit service, as well as class schedules and campus events and news feeds.

Jeff Christofis, Sr. Director and KellyConnect Operations Lead
Sandra Alward-Bury, Applications Development Manager

Kelly Services, Inc. is an American global workforce solutions provider that operates in 41 countries and offers services that include temporary staffing, outsourcing, vendor on-site and full-time placement. Kelly was challenged to deliver outstanding customer service both to their employees as well as to their customers and customer's customers. In an effort to make sure their service was second-to-none, Jeff Christofis and Sandra Alward-Bury partnered with Appirio and Salesforce Service Cloud to build out a 25,000 agent contact center servicing 110 outsourced programs for a truly world-class multi-channel outsourced support infrastructure. Kelly is now able to provide outstanding internal help desk services to a constantly changing and globally distributed employee base and deliver outsourced support services to customers that not only meets operational SLAs, but also exceeds expectations for customer satisfaction, for truly superb service.

Stuart Mills, Head of Strategic Operations
Phil Boyle, Program Manager

Wood Mackenzie is a global energy and mining research and consultancy group with an international reputation for supplying comprehensive data, written analysis and consultancy advice. With a strong history of 15-20 percent natural year-over-year growth, Wood Mackenzie decided it wanted to be more prescriptive about its growth and future. A directive from the board made understanding the customer base a major priority. As a result, Stuart Mills and Phil Boyle spearheaded the company's efforts to invest in a 360* view of the customer with Salesforce.com and Appirio. As a result, Wood Mackenzie is able to better understand and predict the needs of their customers and drive business value and revenue for the company.

2011 Winners

Jane Vaillancourt and Team
2011 Pioneers of the Year

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. Yet prior to this year, their Field Operations team employed a sales solution that was extremely costly to maintain and scale to keep up with NetApp’s growth.

After gathering extensive employee feedback, the NetApp sales ops and IT teams combined resources to revamp their existing sales solution using Salesforce Sales Cloud and other cloud productivity apps. The team was composed of Cloud Pioneer winners Jane Vaillancourt, Cynthia Stoddard, Leslie Thiel, Shihling Liang, Chandransu Choudhury, Teresa Lacsina, Nimish Shah, Thomas Mirrione, Jessie McKay, Christopher Cho, Hiroaki Ajari, Anujit Sarkar and Rita Sair. 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 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.

Lee Anne Hanson, Regional Manager, Franchise Programs

BP, the global oil and gas company headquartered in London is the fourth-largest company in the world and its franchisees independently own and operate both ampm and ARCO service stations throughout the United States. As regional manager of Franchise Programs, Lee Anne Hanson was specifically chosen to spearhead a mobile, cloud-based survey project enabling Franchise Business Consultants to more easily and efficiently complete their jobs in the field. The business transformation among BP's franchisees was progressive and driven by Lee Anne's flexibility and dedication to working with Appirio's agile methodology. Lee Anne championed the project with her outstanding leadership, fully leveraging the technology, which resulted in nearly 100% participation from the FBCs and high user adoption. As a cloud advocate and change agent, she is continuing to push the envelope at BP by developing plans for 2012 to continue to further adoption and increase value for BP franchisees nationwide.

Vala Afshar, Chief Customer Officer
Dan Petlon, Chief Information Officer

Enterasys Networks, a Siemens Enterprise Communications Company, is a premier global provider of wired and wireless network infrastructure and security solutions. At Enterasys, Vala Afshar and Dan Petlon are leading the company's cloud-first initiative and together are continuously pushing the envelope on adopting cloud, social, and mobile technologies. Enterasys was a "first adopter" for Salesforce Chatter and Siteforce, as well as many other cloud technologies. Today, Enterasys has nearly 30 cloud based business applications. In addition to cultivating a cloud culture internally, Vala and Dan have been leading the charge to bring the benefits of cloud computing to Enterasys customers through isaac, the industry's first social media interface that connects your IT network products with your social network. By adding people and products to the social network graph, and moving customer support processes to the cloud, Enterasys is able to leverage Salesforce Service Cloud to better service their customers. Through their vision, innovation and ability to lead, Vala and Dan have brought Enterasys to the forefront of enterprise cloud adoption.

Gary Spears, IT Director

Medtronic, Inc. (NYSE: MDT), is among the Fortune 500 and is the world's largest medical technology company. Gary Spears is the business architect behind Medtronic's enterprise approach of delivering Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data integrity and reliability acrossbusiness units and geographies. Gary has been leading this corporate-wide initiative by delivering Account, Contact, Employee and Sales Hierarchy data to individual business units via a central data hub and Salesforce-to-Salesforce integration. The central hub maintains integrity and reliability of all account and contact data while allowing the individual business units to apply their own unique business rules and requirements. This can be done without impacting the business unit’s individual CRM instances. While maintaining his role as an IT director with the quality of company data being top of mind, Gary has also partnered with each individual business unit. This approach allows each division to drive unique businessoutcomes for the benefit of Medtronic's field sales and service organizations while ultimatelyimproving customer service to the hospitals, doctors and patients they touch on a daily basis.

Toby Lester, VP Global Director Technology Architecture & Innovation

Brown-Forman Corporation is one of the largest American-owned companies in the spirits and wine business with brands including Jack Daniel's, Southern Comfort, Finlandia and Herradura. As a member of a quickly expanding global company, Toby had the foresight to recognize Brown-Forman’s eventual needs for increased mobility and collaboration to support the selling and distributing of Brown-Forman products by a global workforce. Early on, Toby was behind the decision to roll-out a global cloud-based CRM platform, and had the vision to make IT more user-friendly for Brown-Forman's employees. Since then, he has spearheaded initiatives to replace Lotus Notes with Force.com and has made headway in both the mobile and social space, bringing a mobile app to field employees in Europe and Asia and more recently starting an enterprise-wide roll-out of Chatter. Toby has also led the way in rolling out Google apps, which has led to a more connected and empowered workforce, with access to the right data at the right time to make more-informed and faster decisions. Throughout Brown-Forman's journey to take advantage of the public cloud and the Force.com platform, Toby has acted as a change-agent, embracing his background as a technologist by deploying the most modern solutions available to enable Brown-Forman and its employees to do what they do best--strengthen the Brown-Forman brand worldwide.

Dr. Zhengrong Shi, Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Andrew Beebe, Chief Commercial Officer

Suntech (NYSE: STP) develops, manufactures, and delivers the world’s most reliable and cost-effective solar energy solutions. Dr. Shi and Mr. Beebe have been the leaders behind Suntech's global CRM implementation, spearheading the global sales transformation by taking Suntech from separate, homegrown systems to a customized, highly scalable, and global sales infrastructure. Suntech’s new CRM features multi-lingual support, measurement in both watts and multi-currency, and revenue management. By partnering with Appirio, Suntech rolled-out the new system in just 14 weeks which included pilot testing and training for users on three continents in both English and Chinese. With Dr. Shi and Mr. Beebe's leadership, Suntech will continue to transform their business by deploying CRM for additional sales operation processes throughout the world in the coming year.

Kristen Sanders, Director, Global Sales Operations & Sales Enablement

Yahoo! is the premier digital media company, attracting more than half a billion consumers every month in more than 30 languages — making Yahoo! one of the most visited and most trusted Internet destinations. To improve Yahoo!'s ability to monetize these destinations, Kristen Sanders championed Yahoo!'s enterprise collaboration efforts and led the charge in creating "The Source", a Visualforce portal that front ends Content and Chatter for improved sales collaboration. With assistance from Appirio, Kristen led the team that developed an agile, iterative, quick-moving approach to deploying Salesforce.com Content and Chatter in 60 days, on a tight budget. Her visionary approach to Content and Chatter as a collaboration platform that would integrate with Yahoo!'s sales processes and be rolled-out to the broader Yahoo! community, combined with her energy and ability to navigate project hurdles has brought tremendous value to Yahoo!. The Source has been so well received that everyone at Yahoo! would like to have access and it is now being expanded to include learning collaboration between co-workers.

Adam Zoia, CEO
Christina Guerland, Special Assistant to the CEO

Glocap Search is a premier search firm dedicated to serving the specialized recruiting needs of clients in various industries. Adam and Christina have spearheaded the initiative to revolutionize the way Glocap interacts with its applicants and hiring firms by moving its recruiting and staffing platform—used by 90 percent of Glocap employees all day, everyday—to the cloud. With assistance from Appirio, Glocap built a custom Force.com Recruiting Platform integrated with two AppExchange partner applications and 800,000 portal seats. Glocap continues to work with Appirio to take steps to become a full Cloudsourcing company by integrating all of their business applications in the cloud.

2010 Winners

Dick Escue, Sr. VP & CIO
Jayson Chitwood, VP of Information Services
2010 Pioneers of the Year

RehabCare is a national provider of post-acute services, managing rehabilitation programs in partnership with over 1,260 hospitals and skilled nursing facilities. They own and operate 35 long-term acute care and rehabilitation hospitals. Dick and Jayson are leading a strategic initiative to transform RehabCare's technology foundation using platforms like Salesforce, Force.com, Google Apps, Google Health and Apple's iPad. The new technology platform has helped RehabCare dramatically improve their patient intake and referral process, the way they track, benchmark and improve rehabilitation procedures, and the way they report and communicate progress to Medicare, patients and their families.

Mary Ann Lusk, Director of CRM
John Cunningham, Sr. Business Process & Planning Analyst

DeVry Inc. (NYSE: DV, member S&P 500 Index) is the parent organization of DeVry University, Advanced Academics, Ross University, Chamberlain College of Nursing, Apollo College, Western Career College, Becker Professional Education, and Fanor. Mary Ann and John are driving a multi-year company-wide initiative to transform all of DeVry's student-facing processes. In 2010, they led a major project to build a cloud-based applicant management process using a heavily customized version of Salesforce CRM integrated with 30+ other systems. This has already led to a 50x improvement in response time to prospective student’s inquiries, a reduction in application processing time and a significant increase in overall responsiveness to students.

Curt Hodge, Senior Director of Enterprise Applications
Scott Sullivan, Senior Manager of Business Systems

Dolby Laboratories is a globally recognized innovator of audio, imaging, and voice technologies for cinemas, home theaters, PCs, mobile phones, and games. Curt and Scott drove Dolby's early adoption of Salesforce CRM to support multiple customer-facing processes. Over the past few years, Curt and Scott have overseen the migration of many of Dolby's key sales, customer support, and licensing processes to Salesforce.

Mike Wordell, IT Manager
Greg O'Connor, IT Manager
Erik Astin, IT Manager
Jon Cohen, Sr. IT Analyst

Built on more than 50 years of innovation and fun, Dunkin’ Brands, Inc. leads and builds great brands at the forefront of the quick service restaurant segment of the food and beverage industry. Michael, Erik, Greg, and Jon led Dunkin' Brands' efforts to move their business development and franchisee candidate-facing processes to the cloud. With Appirio's help, they implemented Salesforce Sales Cloud as the system of record for all sales processes across Dunkin' Brands and built three custom websites on Salesforce Sites to manage initial franchisee applications, restaurants available for sale, and event RSVPs. Now, Dunkin' Brands has a consistent franchising recruitment and business development process built on a modern, flexible and scalable cloud platform.

Marie Sonde, VP of Global Field Operations
Khalil Bourenane, Director of Information Services

IMS Health is an information solutions company serving the worldwide pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. Marie and Khalil led a major project to help IMS migrate their core professional services processes across the globe to the cloud with Appirio PS Enterprise. This enabled IMS to standardize project governance, staffing and resource management, time and expense tracking and profitability reporting across its 40 different business units and 1500 consultants. For the first time, IMS will have one standard way of managing and analyzing their consulting operations. The improved visibility into staffing requirements, coupled with better project management, is expected to expand margins considerably, while also improving customer service.

Neale Wooten, Manager of Information Systems

Perceptive Software is a leading creator of enterprise content management (ECM) software products. Neale was instrumental in Perceptive Software's adoption of cloud technologies across their sales, services and professional services organizations. Perceptive migrated from Lotus Notes and Unanet to Salesforce Sales and Service Cloud for roughly 500 internal users, and 5,500 portal users.