"Chatter is a very powerful tool for tracking what’s happening in our company."


— Stratus Technologies

Stratus gains business visibility with Salesforce Chatter and the Force.com cloud platform

Challenge

  • Stratus Technologies, a manufacturer of continuously available enterprise servers and provider of systems integration and consulting services, wanted a technology platform that would provide a 360-degree view of its business operations
  • Lack of integrated systems for aligning key business functions to support sales resulted in inaccurate sales forecasting and made it difficult to justify marketing and other business expenses against actual sales
  • Costly, unwieldy, and complex CRM investments (first Siebel CRM on-premise and then homegrown solutions) weren’t working
  • Multiple business processes were tied to Excel spreadsheets that didn’t reside in a central location, creating bottlenecks and making it difficult to share information

Solution

SALES CLOUD

  • After re-considering Siebel as well as NetSuite and SalesNet, Stratus Technologies deployed Salesforce CRM to 150 sales employees around the world—at one-third the cost of the previous Siebel investment
  • Leveraged the Force.com API to integrate the sales organization with back-office Oracle Financials systems, providing a clear picture of the business from sales across marketing, the supply chain, manufacturing, and expense management
  • Added a partner portal where partners can update cases

 

SERVICE CLOUD

  • Expanded deployment to 25 customer service reps, 100 partner portal users, and 25,000 licenses customer portal users
  • Integrated with a homegrown .NET application that ensures continuous availability of Stratus servers; Cast Iron Systems helped complete the integration
  • Extended deployment to an external call center
  • Added features such as ideas to collect community feedback and knowledge to streamline case resolution

 

FORCE.COM

  • Chose Force.com as a development platform for its availability, performance, scalability, and security
  • Built a professional services app to manage projects that tracks items like resources, expenses, and time from the conception of a project through to booked revenue
  • Built a license management app for the services team that tracks software license purchases and makes it easy for customers to log in to the portal and download new licenses
  • Built a marketing automation app, which tracks existing marketing assets and marketing spend
  • Built a system-loaner application, which tracks computers systems that have been loaned to partners for software development or benchmarketing
  • Built an application for the legal team to manage patents and trademarks
  • Replaced Microsoft SharePoint
  • Integrated with SpringCM, a contract management solution, and implemented single sign-on

 

CHATTER

  • Added Salesforce Chatter in spring 2010 because of dissatisfaction with existing collaboration tools like Google Docs and Microsoft SharePoint
  • With Chatter, employees can capture all the activity surrounding a document, including updates, comments, and links to external information
  • Sales teams use Chatter to share information about particular deals and more efficiently collaborate with other departments like engineering to close deals faster
  • Customer support uses Chatter to share information about issues and to “follow” specific customers and installations
  • Turned on Chatter for all custom Force.com applications and third-party applications that are integrated with the Force.com cloud platform; any significant activity tracked in an app is now shared in real-time updates

Results

SALES CLOUD

  • The initial deployment was completed at one-third the cost of a similar Siebel deployment
  • Bidirectional integration between Salesforce CRM and Oracle took only 7 weeks to build using the Force.com API
  • User adoption occurred almost instantly—as much as 90 percent of the sales teams access Salesforce CRM at least once a week—contributing to more accurate reporting and business tracking
  • Lead conversion accelerated from weeks or months to as little as 1 day
  • Gained visibility into marketing campaign ROI
  • Achieved higher deal close rates

 

SERVICE CLOUD

  • Improved customer service by adding Chatter, giving agents a 360-degree customer view
  • Increased customer satisfaction by simplifying how partners and customers interact with Stratus
  • Resolving customer cases more quickly with Chatter and the integrated knowledge base
  • Better collaboration among agents as a result of adding Chatter to the Service Cloud

 

FORCE.COM

  • With the Force.com platform, Stratus can cost-effectively develop custom apps
  • Developed and deployed the professional services app to field services in just 3 weeks
  • A single employee is responsible for configuring and enhancing as many as six different applications
  • Achieved greater transparency across the company; material previously stored in isolated spreadsheets and hard to find is now readily available
  • The new 360-degree customer view empowers everyone to make better, more customer-focused decisions
  • A single sign-on to multiple Web-based apps means employees accomplish tasks faster
  • Improved efficiency helped Stratus complete a necessary workforce reduction because employees were able to take on additional tasks

 

CHATTER

  • Improved collaboration throughout the company by rolling out Chatter; the sales team now has more resources to close deals at no extra cost
  • With Chatter, new employees are able to get up to speed more quickly by tapping into institutional knowledge
  • Transformed customer service into a proactive rather than a reactive business function
  • Business events that were previously stored in multiple systems are unified in a real-time activity stream that can be organized, shared, tagged, and tracked without additional IT resources

 

Full Case Study

Stratus CIO Joe Graves was initially dubious when he heard about Salesforce Chatter. “I thought it sounded like a knockoff of LinkedIn or Twitter,” he recalled. “I saw the value, but it didn't necessarily strike me as a killer app.”

Then Graves started using Chatter. “The power of it became evident,” he said.

Stratus prides itself on being at the leading edge of IT. Its mission—to help customers keep critical business operations online without interruption—requires Stratus embrace innovation. The 30-year-old company started virtualizing its servers in 2001. Last year, Stratus broke a significant industry barrier by unveiling technology that delivers continuous availability on general-purpose Intel servers.

Graves attributes part of the company’s success to Salesforce. “Over time, Salesforce became part of our DNA,” he explained. Stratus began adopting Salesforce applications in 2004, and now uses it for five cloud-based solutions. “It’s become the cornerstone of our IT strategy,” Graves said.

Among the applications Status has developed on Salesforce are tools for managing projects and tracking software licenses. The professional services application, which took three people working part-time just 3 weeks to develop and deploy. It monitors everything from resources to invoices for the duration of a project. The licenses application, which has records representing each license sold by Stratus, was created to improve the customer and partner experience.

Scott Melick, cloud application manager, said Chatter has made both these applications more powerful. Anyone who is interested can now follow a project in Chatter and receive real-time alerts to any changes in status. Likewise, customer service reps can follow specific installations and be immediately notified of any issues.

“Chatter lets us be proactive instead of reactive,” Melick said.

Another benefit from Chatter is enhanced interdepartmental collaboration. In addition to following changes in custom applications, employees can personalize Chatter to follow whatever data helps get a job done better. For example, they can set up Chatter to follow a customer, a lead, or an opportunity.

Graves said two new sales employees turned Chatter into a great productivity tool by using it to maintain a constant conversation to share the workload and exchange ideas, saying "Hey, work this deal," "I'm having an issue," "Can I assign this customer to you?" or "I don't understand what this customer wants."

"They're both new employees, and they hadn't yet built the internal network to be successful," Graves said. "But by using Chatter they were getting help from engineering and veteran salespeople who've addressed the same issues."

Another example Graves cited is an account executive who needed information about one of Stratus’s product lines. Instead of spraying the engineering department with shotgun emails, she
sent out a Chatter message and within minutes she got back the relevant document.

But perhaps the most valuable aspect of Chatter is that it can animate any system that is integrated into Force.com’s cloud computing platform. All an administrator has to do is click a few boxes. For example, when an internal call tracking system receives a call from a client, the call is automatically logged in salesforce. Now, any user who is following that account on Chatter will also be notified each time the client calls.

In Stratus’s case, about 90 percent of its requests for support come directly from hardware it has installed at customer sites as part of its remote service management service. While these requests have always triggered formal notification procedures, Chatter provides a way for individuals with a more peripheral interest to also stay abreast of any changes in an installation or an account.

These kinds of real-time activity streams provide unprecedented visibility. Before Chatter, a product manager or an account manager would have to piece together information from different sources. With Chatter, they essentially get a personalized report that can be delivered to a mobile device like the iPhone.

Best of all, the ability to pull together business events from multiple systems, requires no IT intervention. And customized activity streams can be discussed, organized, routed, tagged, and tracked. Executives can instantly stay informed of what is happening in their businesses on every level. "That's a very powerful feature for management," Graves said.

Stratus Technologies

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