Free to Innovate with Force.com, Riskonnect Delivers Revolutionary Enterprise Risk Management Solution

Experience is the best teacher. Take it from Bob Morrell, CEO of Riskonnect.

Prior to founding Riskonnect, Morrell worked at a traditional risk management software company where he built a platform as well as a brick-and-mortar data center from the ground up. Morrell found himself bogged down by the amount of time and energy that went into maintaining the infrastructure.

"The reality is that we focused so much on our platform and on infrastructure that we didn't focus as much on our end-product," says Morrell. "The stress of managing a global infrastructure 24/7 wore on me. It was counterproductive."

Market-Ready in Months, Not Years

So when it came time to start Riskonnect in July 2007, procuring the Force.com platform was Morrell's first order of business.

"It was apparent that the Force.com platform would provide an instant infrastructure with proven security and reliability right out-of-the-box," he explains. "We wouldn't have to build or manage anything. It was a sea change from what I was used to."

In three months, the company built its enterprise risk management application on the Force.com platform—the world's first platform as a service that delivers best-in-class security and reliability to more than one million users. Riskonnect's offering is a purely native application that runs solely on the Web-based platform, with no additional software or servers required.

Aside from purchasing licenses, the company incurred little startup costs and delivered its product to the market within months. "The reality is that without Force.com it would have taken three years and much more cost to get this product market-ready," Morrell says.

"Because the backend was taken care of, we were free to create the best product possible and get it out in the market faster than I could have imagined."

In terms of securing funding, a pre-built platform meant Riskonnect could focus most capital on sales and marketing, with very little required for development. "It's a phenomenal thing for an entrepreneur to find we needed little capital to address research and development, but could hand those funds over to sales and marketing," Morrell explains.

Passing the First Test

Within the first months of operation, Riskonnect won Southern Company as a customer. As one of the largest utilities in the country, the company has strict security requirements, yet Riskonnect had no problems in passing that test.

"When you sell software as a service, you sell security," Morrell says. "Southern got the SAS 70 certification directly from salesforce.com and I pointed to the trust.salesforce.com site that maintains systems status for reliability. With Force.com, we had security nailed."

Riskonnect has found the Force.com platform to be such a competitive advantage during the sales process that its advantages go un-discussed, which leaves more time for the company to sell the benefits of its offering.

"Before the sales process even begins, the customer knows we can provide bulletproof security and reliability because they've received the documentation on the Force.com platform up front," Morrell says. "We don't have to worry about answering those questions, which leaves more time for us to learn about our customer's needs and therefore better demonstrate how our product will help them."

Free to Innovate

Riskonnect provides a global platform for both assessing risks and managing those risks. Relieved of its need to maintain infrastructure, the company can focus in on its highest-level features and execute on its plan to deliver the most effective application possible.

"Mitigating risk can be a daunting task and almost all companies use spreadsheets," says Morrell. "With Riskonnect, the Force.com is the best-in-class platform for enterprise risk management. It's freed us to innovate our visual method and deliver the most intuitive solution to our customers."

Riskonnect runs on Force.com and with thousands of lines of Apex code, pulls its data from the Force.com platform and processes it into internal data structures that create visualizations to help users understand their risks better. The application also can be easily customized to each customer's specifications.

"We have very demanding customers who want screens laid out in very specific ways," Morrell says. "The Force.com platform makes customizing our solution a breeze. We're able to leverage the platform's workflow capabilities to create the exact user experience our customers desire."

Force.com Advantages, On and Off the Playing Field

The first thing that comes to mind when speaking about competitive advantage isn’t usually infrastructure, however Riskonnect has found one of its secrets to success is just that."My competitors’ implementations are all about getting the software up and running, instead of solving business problems,” says Morrell. "With the Force.com platform, my implementation is about addressing the business need of the customer. Getting up and running is like signing them up. There's nothing to do.”The advantages of the platform extend beyond the office as well."We ran into a former employee who was working on a release that weekend and he said he wasn’t sure if it was going to happen,” Morrell added. "I’ve been there, done that. If I know salesforce.com is doing a release this weekend, I don't have to worry about it. I can enjoy myself.”This doesn’t imply that Riskonnect does not use developers. "You still need developers. You still need good people; it’s just that 95 percent of it is done for you,” continues Morrell.

An Army Behind Us

One thing Riskonnect is not worried about is slowing down its innovation. As the company continues to add features and fine-tune its application, the Force.com platform continues to advance its development possibilities, which Morrell contends is good for his business.

“Salesforce.com has its competitors and that’s a good thing for us. It keeps them at the top of their game—and opens up new development possibilities for us as well.”

Riskonnect counts on the strength of the numerous people behind the Force.com platform—the foundation of its business—to help meet its goals. Morrell adds, “We’re a small company, but running Force.com means we have hundreds of people working for us. If you take into consideration everyone at salesforce.com, we have an army behind us.

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