SEATTLE, WA — (Marketwired) — 03/16/16 — The global business community has watched with great interest in the past several years as Silicon Valley companies such as AirBnB and Stripe have disrupted decades-old industries, and companies like LinkedIn, Slack and Dropbox have created new multi-billion-dollar markets seemingly overnight. How did they move so quickly? Was it big data, a big idea or new technologies such as software as a service? The answer is yes to all of the above, with the addition of one key ingredient: business operations, or BizOps.
BizOps is an emerging practice that unifies teams, technologies and end-to-end processes to achieve important business objectives. Similar to the service-focused transformation DevOps brought to IT and engineering, BizOps is causing a fundamental shift toward innovation, agility and more automated processes in sales, marketing and finance. BizOps has three core principles:
Break down the walls between business operations teams such as marketing, sales and finance;
Shift perspective from tactical management of leads, opportunities and escalations to a more strategic focus on customer, partner and product lifecycles;
Combine analysis with action and experimentation to perpetuate growth, decrease churn and cost of sales, and increase the lifetime value of a customer.
“This is how every company wants to work today, but these principles are hard to put into practice,” said Michel Feaster, co-founder and CEO of Usermind, one of the technology pioneers of the BizOps movement. “While the last 10 years have brought optimized, individual SaaS applications to each department, very few companies can effectively connect them to drive end-to-end business processes.”
Today, most companies aren–t practicing BizOps — or even thinking of it as a possibility — because of the investment required to build an infrastructure from scratch and maintain it. Usually, the best companies can do is to focus on optimizing SalesOps, MarketingOps or other functional initiatives where there are commercial platforms available to support them, such as Marketo. It takes significantly more strategy, time, technical capabilities and buy-in to establish company-wide business processes.
Even if there are innovators inside a company who want to initiate a BizOps effort, most companies don–t have the R&D resources or investment capital to create and maintain a custom BizOps function. Until now, the cost and complexity of implementing BizOps have been prohibitive to mainstream companies.
The first and only offering for BizOps is Usermind (see separate ), a unified platform for orchestrating business operations.
“After witnessing the early custom-built BizOps platforms in action at Silicon Valley companies, we realized that the vast majority of the effort involved in creating and maintaining infrastructure could be eliminated through a new, purpose-built platform,” said Przemek Pardyak, co-founder and CTO of Usermind.
Usermind centralizes business logic and data into a single orchestration hub, which lets teams connect enterprise apps and map data to user-defined key business entities, such as customer or partner. In addition, the platform can trigger real-time actions, measure impact and make process improvements — all within the same workflow. Usermind reduces BizOps project costs and time previously spent coding, integrating, deploying, testing and analyzing new business processes. With a BizOps infrastructure in place, operations teams can manage what really matters, shifting from tactical to strategic operations.
“When our customers see a preview of what they can orchestrate with our platform, they always want more. And given the results they are achieving in a relatively short amount of time, we believe BizOps will become as indispensable a discipline as DevOps is today,” Pardyak added.
With dedicated BizOps platforms becoming available, industry analysts believe that many more companies will begin embarking on BizOps initiatives, much like the rapid expansion of DevOps was triggered by the entry of the Puppet Labs and Chef platforms into the market. “No doubt, the BizOps opportunity is large, both for companies that embrace BizOps practices and for the ecosystem of vendors that is sure to spring up around this trend,” said Matt Murphy, managing director of Menlo Ventures, who led Usermind–s $14.5 million Series B financing.
Usermind provides the first unified platform for orchestrating business operations (BizOps). With Usermind, companies can define and automate all aspects of their customer lifecycles to improve revenue, retention and profitability. Built for the nontechnical user, Usermind makes it simple to integrate enterprise applications, map data between them, automate end-to-end processes, measure the impact of processes on business outcomes, and take instant action to improve them. With a BizOps infrastructure in place, operations teams can manage what really matters, shifting from tactical management of leads, opportunities, and invoices to strategic management of customer, partner and product lifecycles. Founded in 2013, Usermind is based in Seattle and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, CRV and Menlo Ventures. Visit us at or on Twitter:
Press Contact:
Nicole Pitaro
Bhava Communications for Usermind
510-356-0014
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