The Long-Term Value of AgilePoint: Unveiling the Customer Insights

By
Arjun Jamnadass
May 31, 2024
6
min read
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Transformation Trailblazer

AgilePoint has emerged as a visionary trailblazer in the realm of digital transformation, offering a powerful adaptive process automation platform for enterprises. Stemming from lessons learned during the turbulent period of the dot-com bubble, where high-profile failures highlighted the critical need for agility and resilience, AgilePoint set out to empower organizations to react and respond quickly and continuously to a relentlessly changing landscape.

The Codeless Differentiator

Today, AgilePoint remains the preferred digital transformation platform for many global organizations, thanks to its codeless architecture delivering unrivaled agility and cost efficiency. Remarkably, even after two decades, numerous customers continue to rely on AgilePoint as a core capability and key competitive differentiator.

We pride ourselves in the long-term relationships we maintain with our clients. Today, where companies stay an average of 5 years with a technology vendor, many of AgilePoint customers have been with us for up to two decades.  

Speed, adaptability, transparency, cost efficiency, security, trust, and confidence.

These are the reasons our customers stay. The following experiences come from Fortune 100s and publicly listed companies, including a longtime customer where AgilePoint enabled a successful €166 billion merger.

1. Accelerated Development and Adaptation

AgilePoint enables organizations to be adaptive without the significant upfront investment. It enables the rapid deployment of highly adaptable business solutions and gives organizations the ability to evolve them in real-time to cater to emerging opportunities and continually drive towards better customer outcomes and product-market fit.

1.1 Speed

"If a project is two years long, then we can't spend six months building an application. We need to build it in two to three weeks. With AgilePoint, we can." These are the words of a director at a Fortune 100 Engineering firm that has been with AgilePoint for 14 years. His comment highlights their need for rapid development cycles essential for quick turnaround initiatives. Indeed, with a stream of constantly evolving requirements, the firm needed a platform that would allow them to ramp up and put into production tailored solutions as quickly as possible.

1.2 Continuously adaptation

But they also wanted the ability to adapt these solutions continuously and have the flexibility to bespoke them for specific customer projects rather than halting production lines and redesigning solutions from the ground up to cater to specific customer requirements. "The flexibility to adapt is crucial." as stated by the same director, "Changes are needed because we are a project company. [The business] changes [and] the rules and people constantly change. So, we needed something flexible."

1.3 Keeping pace without breaking the bank

AgilePoint has provided the essential capabilities this Fortune 100 engineering firm has needed all these years to keep pace with high market demand while delighting its customers with highly personalized solutions without breaking the bank. Henry Ford famously said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” Indeed, the entire production line would have had to be shut down to accommodate a different color. Not so for this engineering firm.

2. Transparent, Adaptable Automations

2.1 Lengthy process cycles, lack of visibility, and non-compliance

A spokesperson from one of the world’s largest defense companies, and an AgilePoint customer for the last 17 years, highlighted the challenges their organization faced before AgilePoint, including lengthy process cycles, lack of visibility, and non-compliance with regulations.

2.2 Struggling to adapt

Before AgilePoint, they were struggling to evergreen their cross-functional automation (complex, end-to-end, cross-departmental automated workflows) as their incumbent platform could not provide them with the flexibility and dynamism they needed to prepare for and deliver a massive overhaul of their operations (they were amid a large, time-sensitive merger) while keeping in line with regulatory requirements.

The company needed more transparency concerning its automation processes, which significantly hampered its ability to pinpoint compliance issues. The rapidly evolving landscape continually outpaced their responsiveness. Business users found it challenging to comprehend, much less modify, these automated procedures, resulting in frequent regulatory non-compliance. Consequently, their solutions needed to be more relevant and aligned before they could be tended to by the IT department.

2.3 Time lost

"We found out that time loss in two ways. One, the process cycle was very long. And two, the business users needed to control where anything stood. We found many of our processes did not follow the official and approved procedures."

2.4 The Gamechanger

After extremely lengthy due diligence, AgilePoint was chosen as the platform to handle the defense company’s rapidly evolving operations and underpin the post-merger operating model. Indeed, the platform gave them the visibility they needed to stay on top of and compliant with a changing regulatory landscape. It enabled them to adapt their process automation in real time. Ultimately, the high level of transparency of their process automation and ease of adapting them on the fly proved to be the game-changers for the defense company.

3. Simple Modernization

3.1 Straightforward and painless

A publicly listed German Leasing company and an AgilePoint customer for over 15 years had considered replacing AgilePoint as their enterprise automation platform a few times, driven by internal strategy initiatives to consolidate their technology footprint. However, they decided to stick with AgilePoint when it became evident that alternative solutions could not match the “straightforward and painless” upgrade and modernization experience.

3.2 No additional cost

AgilePoint never charges for the ongoing, continuous modernization of the platform, a key driver in sustaining prolonged customer loyalty. Nor does the modernization require expensive implementation partners to carry out upgrades.

3.3 The alternatives are expensive

A vice president at a Media company noted that their previous platform required costly implementation partners to manage changes and upgrades.

He stated, "[Our old platform] was costly because we didn't have developers for it. We always needed an implementation partner, meaning we had to pay both the partner and the licenses [for our old automation platform]."

3.4 Avoid heavy investments

Additionally, AgilePoint's integrations are not hard-coded, meaning that customers avoid having to invest heavily in ensuring continued interoperability and harmony across the IT ecosystem with each new AgilePoint release, or with any changes they make to their underlying IT infrastructure.

3.5 Disruption-free, seamless upgrades

The platform's core principles are simple, continuous modernization without predatory pricing schemes. With its codeless architecture, AgilePoint has ensured that, for the past 15 years, the German Leasing company's business experiences a disruption-free, seamless upgrade to the latest release. Downtime is virtually negligible. As a result, the publicly listed company had the peace of mind that their business-critical solutions and automation were kept safe, secure, and up to date at no additional cost.

4. Continuous Innovation

4.1 Compatibility

AgilePoint's commitment to sustaining long-term value through innovation resonated strongly with customers. A business manager at a global Non-Profit organization expressed concern about other vendors' lack of product advancement. In contrast, AgilePoint actively ensures its product retains its robust security credentials, remains compatible with evolving technology platforms, and regularly delivers the latest capabilities and enhanced functionality into the platform.

4.2 Keeping pace with technology

According to the director of the Fortune 100 Engineering firm, "AgilePoint helped us because the technology advanced fast." This focus on continuous technological advancement ensures that organizations can continue to rely on AgilePoint to keep pace with the latest industry standards and competitive pressures."

The same business manager stated, "AgilePoint made it possible for us to stay updated with the changing digital transformation happening around the globe. AgilePoint has made it possible for us to do things that we wouldn't have thought of."

4.3 Groundbreaking and robust

The Non-Profit organization and the Engineering firm, both customers for over a decade, continue to benefit from leveraging AgilePoint across their core business operations. Drawing on cross-industry best practices and incorporating the latest trends and innovative thinking, AgilePoint continually infuses the platform with ground-breaking features and robust capabilities. This steadfast commitment to technological advancement enhances its customers' long-term experience and outcomes.

5. Transparent, predictable pricing

5.1 Transparent and cost-efficient licensing

A Fortune 100 technology and manufacturing conglomerate, and an AgilePoint customer for over a decade, illustrates the power of transparent and cost-efficient licensing in the digital transformation journey. The organization built a vast portfolio of deeply customized, mission-critical workflow on-premise automations. It was ready to harness the benefits of the cloud. The objective was clear: maintaining the most secure processes on-premise while gradually transitioning all other operations to the cloud.

5.2 Multiple licenses needed

Their incumbent vendor, however, threw them a curveball. Accommodating the conglomerate’s phased migration plan called for multiple licenses for the different versions of their on-premise and cloud platforms, thereby inflating costs considerably. This predicament, by no means an isolated case, underscores the need for transparent, cost-effective licensing agreements that facilitate rather than penalize growth, and here, again, is why AgilePoint maintains enduring relationships with its customers.

5.3 Expensive rebuild

In the conglomerate’s case, not only did they have to effectively double their licensing spend to handle both on-premise and cloud operations, but it transpired that migrating their on-premise workflows to the cloud required an extensive technical rebuild. They were forced to decide; do they retain their heavily customized, business-critical workflows on-premise or undertake the substantial task of process rebuilding for cloud migration.

Only a single license required

Ultimately, the conglomerate moved to AgilePoint to handle its workflow automations. AgilePoint requires a single license, regardless of whether customers operate on-premise, in the cloud, or straddle both environments.

With AgilePoint's codeless architecture, the conglomerate could rapidly recreate its workflow automations and maintain them on-premise and in the cloud with a single license, knowing they could seamlessly migrate them between the two without rebuilding everything. It is the essence of AgilePoint's customer-centric approach - delivering cost transparency, efficiency, and maximum flexibility.

The Power of Codeless Architecture

The success and longevity of AgilePoint as a trusted platform for customers over the years can be attributed to its codeless architecture. AgilePoint recognized, way back in 2003, that code creates technical debt and that this debt inevitably saps competitiveness, limits agility, and slows innovation, ultimately leading to system collapse.

As author and software engineer Martin Fowler said, “Technical debt is not just a cost; it’s also a risk. It’s a risk that your system will fail at a critical moment, you won’t be able to deliver what your customers need, or you’ll lose your best engineers because they’re frustrated with working on a mess.”

And managing technical debt is expensive. According to a McKinsey survey, CIOs reported that 10 to 20% of the technology budget dedicated to new products is diverted to resolving issues related to tech debt. A study by Stripe found that developers spend an average of 33% of their time dealing with technical debt. Worldwide, this adds up to a $3 trillion hit on global GDP.

AgilePoint’s codeless architecture was created to circumvent technical debt. To bypass the need for hard-coded business solutions that are complex and expensive to update. Coupled with an intuitive front-end and model-driven, declarative approach to building solutions that caters for non-technical users, the codeless architecture is exposed outside of the IT department, enabling businesses to quickly respond to changing needs and emerging opportunities without having to resort to writing even a single line of code.

In my entire IT and business experience, I think AgilePoint was one of the best decisions that our organization ever made.

As AgilePoint customers testify to its transformative power and the profound impact it has on their operations, it solidifies its position as a platform of choice for some of the world’s leading organizations seeking continuous, sustainable digital transformation.

In the words of one AgilePoint customer representative "In my entire IT and business experience, I think AgilePoint was one of the best decisions that our organization ever made."

If your company is a $500m + enterprise and wants to discuss implementing codeless automation, please get in touch with Arjun Jamnadass, Chief Customer Officer and Head of EMEA, AgilePoint at arjun.jamnadass@agilepoint.com

Share this post
Arjun Jamnadass
Insight

The Long-Term Value of AgilePoint: Unveiling the Customer Insights

Arjun Jamnadass
May 31, 2024
6
min

AgilePoint is an adaptive enterprise process automation platform. Our philosophy is that all code creates future choke points, ultimately leading to system collapse.

That is why our platform is completely codeless. Allowing you to transform your business model by simplifying the processes that fundamentally underpin the applications you are running and making your organization faster, more secure, resilient, and fully adaptive.

Transformation Trailblazer

AgilePoint has emerged as a visionary trailblazer in the realm of digital transformation, offering a powerful adaptive process automation platform for enterprises. Stemming from lessons learned during the turbulent period of the dot-com bubble, where high-profile failures highlighted the critical need for agility and resilience, AgilePoint set out to empower organizations to react and respond quickly and continuously to a relentlessly changing landscape.

The Codeless Differentiator

Today, AgilePoint remains the preferred digital transformation platform for many global organizations, thanks to its codeless architecture delivering unrivaled agility and cost efficiency. Remarkably, even after two decades, numerous customers continue to rely on AgilePoint as a core capability and key competitive differentiator.

We pride ourselves in the long-term relationships we maintain with our clients. Today, where companies stay an average of 5 years with a technology vendor, many of AgilePoint customers have been with us for up to two decades.  

Speed, adaptability, transparency, cost efficiency, security, trust, and confidence.

These are the reasons our customers stay. The following experiences come from Fortune 100s and publicly listed companies, including a longtime customer where AgilePoint enabled a successful €166 billion merger.

1. Accelerated Development and Adaptation

AgilePoint enables organizations to be adaptive without the significant upfront investment. It enables the rapid deployment of highly adaptable business solutions and gives organizations the ability to evolve them in real-time to cater to emerging opportunities and continually drive towards better customer outcomes and product-market fit.

1.1 Speed

"If a project is two years long, then we can't spend six months building an application. We need to build it in two to three weeks. With AgilePoint, we can." These are the words of a director at a Fortune 100 Engineering firm that has been with AgilePoint for 14 years. His comment highlights their need for rapid development cycles essential for quick turnaround initiatives. Indeed, with a stream of constantly evolving requirements, the firm needed a platform that would allow them to ramp up and put into production tailored solutions as quickly as possible.

1.2 Continuously adaptation

But they also wanted the ability to adapt these solutions continuously and have the flexibility to bespoke them for specific customer projects rather than halting production lines and redesigning solutions from the ground up to cater to specific customer requirements. "The flexibility to adapt is crucial." as stated by the same director, "Changes are needed because we are a project company. [The business] changes [and] the rules and people constantly change. So, we needed something flexible."

1.3 Keeping pace without breaking the bank

AgilePoint has provided the essential capabilities this Fortune 100 engineering firm has needed all these years to keep pace with high market demand while delighting its customers with highly personalized solutions without breaking the bank. Henry Ford famously said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” Indeed, the entire production line would have had to be shut down to accommodate a different color. Not so for this engineering firm.

2. Transparent, Adaptable Automations

2.1 Lengthy process cycles, lack of visibility, and non-compliance

A spokesperson from one of the world’s largest defense companies, and an AgilePoint customer for the last 17 years, highlighted the challenges their organization faced before AgilePoint, including lengthy process cycles, lack of visibility, and non-compliance with regulations.

2.2 Struggling to adapt

Before AgilePoint, they were struggling to evergreen their cross-functional automation (complex, end-to-end, cross-departmental automated workflows) as their incumbent platform could not provide them with the flexibility and dynamism they needed to prepare for and deliver a massive overhaul of their operations (they were amid a large, time-sensitive merger) while keeping in line with regulatory requirements.

The company needed more transparency concerning its automation processes, which significantly hampered its ability to pinpoint compliance issues. The rapidly evolving landscape continually outpaced their responsiveness. Business users found it challenging to comprehend, much less modify, these automated procedures, resulting in frequent regulatory non-compliance. Consequently, their solutions needed to be more relevant and aligned before they could be tended to by the IT department.

2.3 Time lost

"We found out that time loss in two ways. One, the process cycle was very long. And two, the business users needed to control where anything stood. We found many of our processes did not follow the official and approved procedures."

2.4 The Gamechanger

After extremely lengthy due diligence, AgilePoint was chosen as the platform to handle the defense company’s rapidly evolving operations and underpin the post-merger operating model. Indeed, the platform gave them the visibility they needed to stay on top of and compliant with a changing regulatory landscape. It enabled them to adapt their process automation in real time. Ultimately, the high level of transparency of their process automation and ease of adapting them on the fly proved to be the game-changers for the defense company.

3. Simple Modernization

3.1 Straightforward and painless

A publicly listed German Leasing company and an AgilePoint customer for over 15 years had considered replacing AgilePoint as their enterprise automation platform a few times, driven by internal strategy initiatives to consolidate their technology footprint. However, they decided to stick with AgilePoint when it became evident that alternative solutions could not match the “straightforward and painless” upgrade and modernization experience.

3.2 No additional cost

AgilePoint never charges for the ongoing, continuous modernization of the platform, a key driver in sustaining prolonged customer loyalty. Nor does the modernization require expensive implementation partners to carry out upgrades.

3.3 The alternatives are expensive

A vice president at a Media company noted that their previous platform required costly implementation partners to manage changes and upgrades.

He stated, "[Our old platform] was costly because we didn't have developers for it. We always needed an implementation partner, meaning we had to pay both the partner and the licenses [for our old automation platform]."

3.4 Avoid heavy investments

Additionally, AgilePoint's integrations are not hard-coded, meaning that customers avoid having to invest heavily in ensuring continued interoperability and harmony across the IT ecosystem with each new AgilePoint release, or with any changes they make to their underlying IT infrastructure.

3.5 Disruption-free, seamless upgrades

The platform's core principles are simple, continuous modernization without predatory pricing schemes. With its codeless architecture, AgilePoint has ensured that, for the past 15 years, the German Leasing company's business experiences a disruption-free, seamless upgrade to the latest release. Downtime is virtually negligible. As a result, the publicly listed company had the peace of mind that their business-critical solutions and automation were kept safe, secure, and up to date at no additional cost.

4. Continuous Innovation

4.1 Compatibility

AgilePoint's commitment to sustaining long-term value through innovation resonated strongly with customers. A business manager at a global Non-Profit organization expressed concern about other vendors' lack of product advancement. In contrast, AgilePoint actively ensures its product retains its robust security credentials, remains compatible with evolving technology platforms, and regularly delivers the latest capabilities and enhanced functionality into the platform.

4.2 Keeping pace with technology

According to the director of the Fortune 100 Engineering firm, "AgilePoint helped us because the technology advanced fast." This focus on continuous technological advancement ensures that organizations can continue to rely on AgilePoint to keep pace with the latest industry standards and competitive pressures."

The same business manager stated, "AgilePoint made it possible for us to stay updated with the changing digital transformation happening around the globe. AgilePoint has made it possible for us to do things that we wouldn't have thought of."

4.3 Groundbreaking and robust

The Non-Profit organization and the Engineering firm, both customers for over a decade, continue to benefit from leveraging AgilePoint across their core business operations. Drawing on cross-industry best practices and incorporating the latest trends and innovative thinking, AgilePoint continually infuses the platform with ground-breaking features and robust capabilities. This steadfast commitment to technological advancement enhances its customers' long-term experience and outcomes.

5. Transparent, predictable pricing

5.1 Transparent and cost-efficient licensing

A Fortune 100 technology and manufacturing conglomerate, and an AgilePoint customer for over a decade, illustrates the power of transparent and cost-efficient licensing in the digital transformation journey. The organization built a vast portfolio of deeply customized, mission-critical workflow on-premise automations. It was ready to harness the benefits of the cloud. The objective was clear: maintaining the most secure processes on-premise while gradually transitioning all other operations to the cloud.

5.2 Multiple licenses needed

Their incumbent vendor, however, threw them a curveball. Accommodating the conglomerate’s phased migration plan called for multiple licenses for the different versions of their on-premise and cloud platforms, thereby inflating costs considerably. This predicament, by no means an isolated case, underscores the need for transparent, cost-effective licensing agreements that facilitate rather than penalize growth, and here, again, is why AgilePoint maintains enduring relationships with its customers.

5.3 Expensive rebuild

In the conglomerate’s case, not only did they have to effectively double their licensing spend to handle both on-premise and cloud operations, but it transpired that migrating their on-premise workflows to the cloud required an extensive technical rebuild. They were forced to decide; do they retain their heavily customized, business-critical workflows on-premise or undertake the substantial task of process rebuilding for cloud migration.

Only a single license required

Ultimately, the conglomerate moved to AgilePoint to handle its workflow automations. AgilePoint requires a single license, regardless of whether customers operate on-premise, in the cloud, or straddle both environments.

With AgilePoint's codeless architecture, the conglomerate could rapidly recreate its workflow automations and maintain them on-premise and in the cloud with a single license, knowing they could seamlessly migrate them between the two without rebuilding everything. It is the essence of AgilePoint's customer-centric approach - delivering cost transparency, efficiency, and maximum flexibility.

The Power of Codeless Architecture

The success and longevity of AgilePoint as a trusted platform for customers over the years can be attributed to its codeless architecture. AgilePoint recognized, way back in 2003, that code creates technical debt and that this debt inevitably saps competitiveness, limits agility, and slows innovation, ultimately leading to system collapse.

As author and software engineer Martin Fowler said, “Technical debt is not just a cost; it’s also a risk. It’s a risk that your system will fail at a critical moment, you won’t be able to deliver what your customers need, or you’ll lose your best engineers because they’re frustrated with working on a mess.”

And managing technical debt is expensive. According to a McKinsey survey, CIOs reported that 10 to 20% of the technology budget dedicated to new products is diverted to resolving issues related to tech debt. A study by Stripe found that developers spend an average of 33% of their time dealing with technical debt. Worldwide, this adds up to a $3 trillion hit on global GDP.

AgilePoint’s codeless architecture was created to circumvent technical debt. To bypass the need for hard-coded business solutions that are complex and expensive to update. Coupled with an intuitive front-end and model-driven, declarative approach to building solutions that caters for non-technical users, the codeless architecture is exposed outside of the IT department, enabling businesses to quickly respond to changing needs and emerging opportunities without having to resort to writing even a single line of code.

In my entire IT and business experience, I think AgilePoint was one of the best decisions that our organization ever made.

As AgilePoint customers testify to its transformative power and the profound impact it has on their operations, it solidifies its position as a platform of choice for some of the world’s leading organizations seeking continuous, sustainable digital transformation.

In the words of one AgilePoint customer representative "In my entire IT and business experience, I think AgilePoint was one of the best decisions that our organization ever made."

If your company is a $500m + enterprise and wants to discuss implementing codeless automation, please get in touch with Arjun Jamnadass, Chief Customer Officer and Head of EMEA, AgilePoint at arjun.jamnadass@agilepoint.com

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