Customer Success: How Integration Cuts Development Time and Cost in Half for an App Company

  We often hear small and large success stories from our customers and users.  They range from the small joys of being able to sync accounting with payroll software all the way to automating hundreds of hours of work across an organization.  Our “Customer Success” series will showcase these stories to illustrate the value Workato integration can bring to various functions at any kind of organization. Our first story of the series is from Goombal, a cloud application designed to help event planners manage and execute events, while also gathering valuable insights and capturing ROI.  We’re pleased to have the chance to interview Vinay Iyer, founder and CEO.

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Workato: Vinay, what was the Goombal world like before Workato? Vinay: We provide software for customers to easily project-manage and run events so that they’re getting measurable ROI.  And to get the kind of data that they need to track everything, since events feed into sales and marketing, we had to integrate Goombal with a number of external apps: CRM and Salesforce, marketing automation like Marketo, and even other event apps like Eventbrite.  Before Workato, my development team had to build these integrations from scratch into each of these systems.  It was a major uphill push. Workato: How much of a push or pain was it? Vinay: It was a huge pain because integration was a critical component to our solution value.  Customers don’t buy apps that won’t work with their existing systems.  In the world of start-ups, speed of execution, cost to deliver a solution, and agility to get to market are critical factors. Workato: Why couldn’t you just keep developing integrations for each client? Vinay: We’re providing customers with a solution of strategic value in terms of the Goombal app.  Dealing with data exchanges between apps, what I call the ‘behind-the-scenes plumbing,’ is not our core competency.  It takes time away from our team to find new customers and get our solution in their hands so that they can manage and run perfect events. Workato: What has Workato meant to Goombal? Vinay: My customers don’t want to know that they have to deal with integration.  For them, their question is: do you integrate with Salesforce, Marketo, and other third-party applications.  And we say yes, we take care of it, and they don’t need to do any IT work.  It becomes much smoother for us to execute on our product and our sales. Workato’s made it easier for Goombal to connect to third-party data sources in fast timeframes.  Otherwise, it takes twice the time and cost.  But also it’s given us flexibility to change our integrations when our customers’ business needs change; we don’t have to restart the whole process. Read more about how Workato can help you connect Salesforce to all  your apps >