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COVID-19 has accelerated digital transformation. In the early days rapid innovation was applauded and allowances were made if the delivery was patchy. Now companies who have mastered change can out-innovate their rivals. However, this requires IT and operations support to be able to change at the speed of the business. The promises made by your website and customer facing teams have to be delivered by the rest of the business. This is why a Change Intelligence Platform like Elements.cloud is required.
Elements aggregates all the business operations and system config knowledge to be able to make changes quickly with confidence. The platform supports the full software development lifecycle; capturing requirements, mapping business processes, drawing ERDs, writing user stories, managing the SaaS metadata dictionaries, providing change impact analysis, documentation and end user help. All connected so that it can be seen in the right context rather than in siloed stores.
Elements was started by three founders who have a proven track record of growing enterprise SaaS companies. Their previous company – Nimbus – supported business transformation and grew from a bedroom in a fishing village in England to supporting global Fortune 500 companies. It needed to pivot from on-premise software to the cloud and weather the storms of the 2001 technology crash and the 2008 banking crisis. And at the same time post stellar growth. The company was acquired in 2011 by TIBCO.
After a few years, Ian Gotts (Founder and CEO of Elements) got the “band back together” to build Elements which is another SaaS business supporting the business change. But this time it is tightly linked to the challenges of managing the config knowledge of enterprise SaaS apps like Salesforce, Slack, Jira, ServiceNow and Workday. The market space is called Change Intelligence.
Ian believes that Change Intelligence is critical to maintaining the agility of low-code / no-code SaaS applications. Their power is the ease of configuration by citizen developers, but this is also their achilles heel. Without an understanding of the impact of changes for all the interconnected SassS apps, agility slows because of the fear that any change will break something. Elements is the only multi-cloud Change Intelligence Platform that aggregates all the SaaS config knowledge so customers can innovate at a pace that gives them a competitive advantage. This makes Elements an “innovation force multiplier”.
Ian’s vision and down-to-earth nature have helped the company attract top talent and grow rapidly. He has the rare ability to make the complex seem simple. He loves to educate and lives most of his life outside the box. His energy and enthusiasm are infectious and his side-long glance at life (and business) enables him to see around corners. This means he comes up with marketing approaches that perform staggeringly well and the company is considered a thought leader.
He has been a Salesforce Customer since 2002 and was a speaker at the first UK “Dreamforce” which was Marc, 3 customers, and 120 delegates!! Since then, he has spoken at Dreamforce and World Tour multiple times and has written 11 books on Salesforce, business analysis, change management, and compliance. He is an entertaining speaker and challenges audiences to think differently.
Ian’s infectious energy and enthusiasm have been a driving force at a time when agility is the defining factor for success. Responding to changing customer demands is more than just changing the website but it is reorienting the entire company. Today, customers are looking for “opinionated software solutions”. They want the software vendor to have domain expertise to be able to advise them on how they need to exploit the software to get immediate results. They expect the vendor to be both a technology expert but also a business transformation expert. Rarely do customers have the time to work out how the software works and how they need to change to make the most of it, particularly if it is innovative.
Elements were forced to make changes to swiftly adapt to the pandemic. At the time when the outbreak of COVID occurred, the company was in a very vulnerable position. It was making the shift from a low-touch sales model to enterprise sales at a time when customer engagement rapidly shifted to remote and digital. It needed to dramatically accelerate that shift or die. The company pivoted quickly from in-person events to virtual webinars and events supported by thought leadership content rather than marketing fluff.
“We developed an Academy which bottled up 20 years of business transformation experience. We formed strategic relationships with consulting firms and complementary technology partners. From that solid foundation we are seeing an acceleration in growth, both in terms of new customers but also the increase in the size of customer deals,” says Ian.
Element’s Academy provides self-paced education to help customers rapidly increase their understanding of best practices for transformational change. The company is hiring experienced customer success managers who can hand-hold customers as they onboard. This has been driven by a demand from the largest customers. Its growing consulting partnerships that can support the customers on larger engagements, and the managed service partners are supporting SME customers.
There is an internal initiative Elements calls Impact360 which is the ability to provide customers with a 360-degree view of the impact of any change across all their business operations and supporting apps. With that 360-degree view, customers can drive changes more quickly with more confidence in success – which is why Element’s tagline is “Accelerate Your Future”.
Expressing his vision for the future, Ian says, “We have a software platform with a clear market lead and the ability to deliver our strategic vision, a customer success team and training content that accelerates time to value for customers, and the support from our investors to be able to achieve staggering growth through 2022. We started by focusing on Salesforce but we are now delivering on our strategic vision to be able to support customer’s interconnected strategic apps. The market demand is massive and under-served.”
