Mansour Chatti has seen it all. As a former solutions engineer and account executive at Salesforce, and now founder of Skuid consulting partner Saasli, he’s deeply acquainted with the problems businesses encounter when trying to deliver enterprise-grade applications to their users.
“I do everything at Saasli, from sales to implementation to support, to janitorial services, the works,” Mansour says. John Ki, meanwhile, moved from Salesforce to Saasli to become a principal consultant for two reasons: 1. He enjoys working with Mansour, and 2. He believes in the power of the Skuid platform. “You know, you get to work with the best technology when you're at Salesforce,” John says.
“And then to see a tool that is as dynamic as Skuid is, and to be able to build on top of an already amazing product, it blew me away.”When Mansour and John stopped by Skuid headquarters in Chattanooga, TN (all the way from Toronto, Ontario) we had to snag them for an interview. We asked about their clients, their vision, and how they help people use Skuid to solve their business problems.
Build, buy, or… die?
When Saasli’s clients approach them seeking a solution, Mansour says, they’re often exhausted from a long journey of searching for solutions to their unique business problems. Many times, they’ve come to the conclusion that their only options are to change their business processes to match a pre-built solution, or build the application completely custom. “They're fighting the battle of die, build, or buy,” says Mansour.
For both the build and buy options, it’s true that there are strong positives, he continues.When a business builds an application completely custom, they get exactly what they’re looking for, but the process of finding development talent, writing requirements, building, testing, and deploying is expensive and time-consuming. If the company buys, however, they don't get exactly what they’re looking for, but they can often implement the solution with less time and resources.
Skuid changes the dynamics of build. You'll still get exactly what you want, but at a fraction of the cost and the time, at which point it makes no sense to buy.
Mansour Chatti, Founder
This, Mansour says, is why clients across industries partner with Saasli and Skuid for all kinds of business processes, from CPQ, to ERP, even to cemetery management in New York. In one of Saasli’s more recent and notable successes, they worked with biotechnology leader TissueTech to create a CPQ app that went live just six weeks after the start of the project.
“We built the app with Skuid in less time that we had spent with another development firm just doing discovery,” said Ian Vargas, director, sales system & customer service at TissueTech.
Achieving digital transformation… by accident.
When Saasli starts out with a customer, they often find that the client is not looking for tools to accomplish digital transformation. They’re not looking for a no-code development platform. They have a very specific problem that they’re looking to solve.
But as they continue their journey with Skuid and Saasli, they start to discover other ways they can use Skuid to transform the way they work. “A large number of the clients that we brought on have transformed their whole business on the Skuid platform, they've gone wall to wall,” John says.
“And it started off with one problem, and then they started realizing that they could leverage this tool across the whole business.” For many companies, using Skuid to streamline business processes and connect to data makes it an ideal jumping-off point for the kind of “digital transformation” that dominates thought leadership today.
As many industry pundits talk about leveraging new technologies like IoT and AI in digital business transformation, many companies are still working on getting everyone in the business on the same page.
One of the big problems with AI, for example, is that you need good data. To get that data, you need people to log in and actually input their data. That’s where Skuid comes in.
John Ki, Principal Consultant
Taking the plunge.
Even with such stunning results, John and Mansour say, the hardest part of a project for Saasli is sometimes simply getting clients to believe what’s possible. They try to think about it from the client’s point of view. “It is non-believable,” John says.
“Clients say, ‘So you're telling me I can get rid of these six apps, and just buy your one, and use it across my whole business?’ But it’s real.” But both John and Mansour can attest that when they’re able to show clients a POC, people start to get excited. “When they can see it in their sandbox in a matter of days,” Mansour says, “It starts to become real.”
Ready to see what you can create with Skuid and Saasli? Try Skuid for free today.
