Orchestration Hub for Business Operations
Usermind, the first business operations (BizOps) technology platform that lets companies coordinate end-to-end processes as well as full customer, product, and partner lifestyles across all of their enterprise apps, has just announced $14.5 million in Series B funding, led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz and CRV. Though ops are traditionally confined to their individual departments, BizOps gets the most out of business logic and data through company-wide software orchestration from sources such as Marketo, MixPanel, and Salesforce with the ultimate result of better retention and improved revenue results than seen in more traditional siloed methods. Corresponding with CloudTweaks, Usermind’s CEO and co-founder Michel Feaster explains, “Right now, many companies aren’t aware of BizOps or that commercial technology exists, but this reality is going to change quickly. Look no further than LinkedIn, Uber or Stripe to understand the potential of BizOps. Every company wants that kind of growth and agility. Consequently, I believe BizOps has the potential to become a $30-50 billion market.”
Feaster, the Harvard dropout who previously led HP’s $1.6 billion acquisition of Opsware, Ben Horowitz’ service automation company. With a career spanning nearly 20 years in various enterprise software roles, Feaster is responsible for company vision, strategic direction, planning, and execution, and her earlier success as VP of products for Apptio where she defined the category and discipline of Technology Business Management, drove product strategy, and helped grow the company from 30 to almost 400 employees, bodes well for Usermind’s future.
BizOps
The emerging business practice of BizOps is designed to drive front-office growth and revenue, similarly to DevOps’ transformation of IT and engineering. Usermind points to three core principles: breaking down the walls between business operation teams; shifting the perspective from tactical management of leads, opportunities, and escalations to a focus on strategic management of customer, partner, and product lifestyles; and combining analysis with action and experimentation for improved growth, decreased cost of sales, and increased lifetime value of customers. Feaster states, “This emerging practice (BizOps) combines teams, strategy and orchestration technology to unify siloed SaaS platforms and other systems of record to create a gestalt. With BizOps, companies can change their perspective from leads, opportunities and escalations to a more strategic focus on customer, partner and product lifecycles.”
Continues Feaster, “The number of SaaS applications such as Salesforce, Workday and Zuora have grown dramatically as companies race to digitize their businesses across all departments. The next step is creating end-to-end processes such as improving collections, reducing churn or providing a seamless customer experience. This is done through BizOps.” Specifically built for marketing, sales, and business operations teams, Usermind professes to be the first unified platform for orchestrating business operations, automating end-to-end processes and unify data across applications and teams without any coding requirements.
By Jennifer Klostermann
