“Why is Simpplr’s Intranet built on Salesforce?”
We recently met with a prospect and the internal communications person asked, “Why are you guys built on Salesforce?” It turned out that she didn’t know very much about Salesforce and was not a user, but she did know that Simpplr was different because of our use of the Salesforce and she wanted to better understand why it mattered.
We get this question all the time, but most often it comes from the CIO or VP of applications vs. the HR and marketing teams – and it is less about curiosity and more about confirmation that Simpplr works with the apps and platform from Salesforce that they already have. Building Simpplr’s social intranet on Salesforce has been critical for several reasons and it is one of the keys to our success.
Most SaaS companies now prefer to partner their backend hosting so they can focus on developing the software. Much like many companies host on Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, or Google Cloud Platform, we’ve taken the premium route and partnered with Salesforce. Simply put, Salesforce provides the best infrastructure security, reliability, and scalability for SaaS companies.
More specifically, here’s why the infrastructure we use matters:
The trust and security of the Salesforce platform
Nothing is more important to our customers than the trust and security of their data, especially when it relates to data about their employees. Salesforce provides the best platform for b2b apps with enterprise-grade security, penetration testing, fully mirrored data centers and a public commitment to consistent performance and uptime. They make information on their uptime and platform performance publicly available at www.trust.salesforce.com.
As a result, we are able to do business with diverse clients like Splunk, eVestment and Eurostar because Simpplr is in compliance with their information security policies. Simpplr’s social intranet gets installed directly into our client’s Salesforce instance and inherits all of the client’s existing permissions and security.
Simpplr’s intranet works with the Salesforce apps our clients already own
Salesforce is the clear market leader in CRM and hundreds of thousands of companies choose Salesforce for sales, service, marketing, and custom applications. When prospects understand that Simpplr works seamlessly with what they already own and use every day, they are much more comfortable with Simpplr as their communication platform.
Quick to install and easy to manage
The infrastructure helps with one of Simpplr’s strongest value propositions: we can deploy our solution faster than the rest of the industry. After deployments, it’s also straightforward to manage: the administrator just needs to add licenses and permission sets, and users are ready to go. As a result, Simpplr can be installed in minutes, and go live to thousands of users in a matter of days, all with limited needs for on-going IT support.
Seamlessly extend the platform
Again, contrary to some industry FUD, you don’t need to buy Salesforce licenses to use Simpplr’s social intranet. We completely OEM this hosting arrangement and your end users will be oblivious to the Salesforce relationship. Simpplr comes with embedded Salesforce platform licenses which enables you to use Simpplr without having to buy any more licenses to run our social intranet app and keep everyone connected. Customers can purchase additional licenses from Salesforce to add more functionality like workflows, cases, packaged applications like customer communities, Service Cloud, or even custom apps on the Salesforce platform. In this way, Simpplr can grow with our clients’ needs and IT strategy.
Consistent innovation
Salesforce has led the way for other cloud companies with three major releases per year across their entire app portfolio and platform. At Simpplr, we take advantage of the platform upgrades and have adopted the same cadence of delivering our major releases three times a year. By building on Salesforce, we get to spend our development energy and resources on user experience and the parts of our application that are different from Salesforce. While this saves us time and money, the bigger winner is our customers because we can make Simpplr 6x better on a yearly basis with Simpplr’s social intranet and Salesforce upgrades.
Again, Salesforce provides the best infrastructure security, reliability, and scalability for SaaS companies. This infrastructure is trusted by hundreds of thousands of businesses, including some of the world’s largest banks and healthcare providers (e.g., Bank of America), and has been audited and certified to effectively comply with all major security standards. Salesforce provides enterprise-grade security, penetration testing, fully-mirrored data centers, and a public commitment to consistent performance and uptime. By augmenting the Salesforce platform with our own security and development practices, Simpplr utilizes some of the most advanced technology for intranet security available today. Plus, it allows us to focus our efforts on building front-end capabilities that help connect and engage your employees.
That’s why our social intranet is built on Salesforce.
