Elements.cloud: Helping Customers Accelerate Changes
10 Most Innovative Salesforce Solutions for 2022
Ian Gotts, Adrian King, and Richard Parker, founder of Elements.cloud, are the trio who have been using Salesforce for over 20 years. They watched Salesforce as it evolved into an enterprise platform and identified the clear need for enterprise-scale implementation tooling.
And this drove the launch of Elements.cloud, a company that provides the most comprehensive business and change impact analysis for Salesforce implementations. This is called a Change Intelligence Platform.
Technological is driving digital transformation
“Salesforce is at the heart of every customer’s digital transformation,” Ian, CEO of Elements.cloud says. While Salesforce has been providing disruptive solutions focused on customer service, analytics, and marketing automation, “the Salesforce implementations are more strategic and becoming more complex with a wider scope,” Ian continues. “Salesforce implementations need to change quickly to support the agile business demands. Any change needs to be analyzed to ensure that it does not break the implementation. And that’s where Elements.cloud comes in.”
With a Change Intelligence Platform from Elements.cloud, those changes can be made quickly with confidence. This is a clear differentiator that enables customers to reach a higher level of operational excellence and competitive advantage.
It all starts with Org Discovery. Customers need a baseline view of the configuration of their Salesforce implementation. This is essentially a metadata dictionary which can be built using the APIs, and then automated impact analysis of the metadata. The challenge is the sheer scale of the Salesforce implementations. Elements.cloud has analyzed some of the largest implementations and over 10 billion metadata items to date.
The company prides itself on how its “customers are staggered by how quickly Elements.cloud can provide the metadata impact analysis,” the founder says, “even for the most complex Salesforce implementation and the value of visual dependency of tree analysis.”
Architected for the future
The successful launch of any product needs to address a narrowly focused customer need. That drives the initial revenue, validation of product roadmap, and ability to attract investment. But the real growth of any business is when it goes beyond and solves wider customer problems.
Elements.cloud has found this key to success right at the start. When we asked the founder to explain, “the different Salesforce products form the core of 360 customer data management. But we focused on providing valuable change intelligence insights for the Salesforce Platform first.”
All the different Salesforce products are configurable. And as customers they are integrated into external applications like NetSuite, ServiceNow and Workday. So, Elements has been architected to analyze and connect all the metadata and documentation for Salesforce products and these disparate systems. There are metadata connectors to Salesforce, Slack, Jira and Pardot, but any customer or partner can build their own connectors.
Cloud contribution to the community
We all have a duty to “send the elevator back down”, the famous quote from Edith Piaf, “When you’ve reached the top, send the elevator back down for the others”. It has been repeated and amplified more recently by Jack Lemon and a viral meme by Kevin Spacey. That means sharing what you have – knowledge, experience, learnings, and resources with others.
Founder of Elements.cloud truly believes in freely sharing their 20 years knowledge about the Salesforce ecosystem and over 30 years business analysis experience.
The company has developed Element Academy training and the Elements Playground which is free access to software. Together, Trailblazers get free hands-on resources directly relevant to the Salesforce ecosystem. Some of these resources have also been incorporated into Salesforce certification and Trailhead.
However, the founder encourages everyone at Elements.cloud to give as much as they can to the community. You will often find them as regular speakers at Dreamforce, TrailheaDX, Dreaming events and user groups. They are also regular contributors to blogs including SalesforceBen and Apex Hours.
Strong team collaboration amidst the crisis
The recent COVID-19 pandemic pushed the whole world into a never foreseen future. As the cases surged worldwide, countries went into a series of lockdowns forcing businesses to adapt to the new normal or shut down their operations.
Although remote working rose as a blessing to many industries, shifting the workplaces from office to homes wasn’t easy for employees as well as the employers.
The founder of Elements.cloud called it early. They proudly recall this decision, “we decided to adopt 100% remote working on 13 March 2020. We standardized our internal and external collaboration tools and developed a platform so we could quickly deliver 100% virtual events on our platform.”
Preparing for the future
The ongoing crisis has accelerated digital transformation and also highlighted the importance of innovation and the adoption of technology. Every organization relies on its core applications, which are increasingly cloud based and constantly evolving.
We wanted to know how Elements.cloud was preparing to be a part of the change. To which the founder had some interesting answers, “we will be the Google Maps for CIO’s entire IT landscape,” they shared, “we will manage all the metadata documentation as well as surface the connection and impact of any change while finding the perfect route to get from A to B as quickly and safely as possible.”
Advice to future entrepreneurs
Leadership is more than guiding the skilled and talented team to perform their best. True leadership is also about creating future leaders. It is the job of leaders to shed some light on their leadership path, share their experiences, and voice insider’s secrets for the future aspirants.
Our leaders in the talk Ian, Adrian, and Richard had some interesting advice for the aspiring entrepreneurs keen to launch that killer app, “Elements.cloud can support the implementation of any system implementation or business change. But initially focusing on one market is critically important.”
“That’s what we did when establishing Elements.cloud,” the trio elaborated, “we focused on the Salesforce market; and that made everything easier for us – product strategy, marketing, partnering, sales, and customer service.”
“So, focus, focus, focus,” they emphasized.
