OpenGate Consulting
Optimizing Organization’s Productivity and Business Processes

In its illustrious history, Salesforce.com has grown exponentially; building an ecosystem allowing CIO’s to make their technology solutions focused on solving business problems. One organization in the ecosystem, OpenGate Consulting, is helping organizations leverage the platform and ecosystem well beyond traditional CRM solutions.

Alec Elmore, Principal and Founder of OpenGate Consulting, is showering plaudits at Salesforce for being an innovative visionary in cloud technology. “Salesforce allows companies to meet (and exceed) their constituent's demands for impactful technology solutions faster and better,” remarks Elmore. OpenGate, helps customers to drive the adoption of Salesforce technology with a focus on the business application of the technology.

According to Elmore, a large percentage of their Salesforce implementations are working with the Business vs. IT team, “Some IT organizations embrace this approach, and others fight to get themselves inserted into the project.” This presents a problem for the IT group: “A common challenge from the CIO’s perspective is that the purchase and set-up of Salesforce can often happen outside of their view or control,” points out Elmore. A successful Salesforce implementation requires the business and IT to collaborate with a focus on business impact, OpenGate refers to this as the “So What” factor.

“One of OpenGate’s key value propositions is to facilitate productive implementation of technology solutions focused on improving business performance, where we speak both “languages” of business and IT,” states Elmore. “Our partnership focuses on having the capability to design very specific solutions that help clients to take advantage of those capabilities,” says Elmore. Specializing in Salesforce and its ecosys¬tem (e.g. Skuid)—OpenGate helps the clients to develop critical new capabilities allowing their operations and employees to take the business to ‘The Next Level of Performance.’

OpenGate collaborates with clients to design metric driven, process oriented technology solutions. The company also helps in extending the footprint of Salesforce, by taking advantage of the platform the traditional CRM capabilities is built on.

One of OpenGate’s key value propositions is to facilitate productive implementation of technology solutions where we speak both “languages” of business and IT

“OpenGate’s typical implementation encompasses many more functions than Sales. We are designing and assembling integrated solutions across the organization through operations, finance, customer support to drive efficiencies, collaboration and competitive advantage,” adds Elmore.

A client in the medical claims business spent a year trying to build a custom solution to support their customer operations. The client required a solution to scale at the same pace of their growth. Spending a year in development using. Net, the original development effort resulted in delivering less than 50 percent of the customer‘s requirements.

After introducing the Salesforce platform, OpenGate helped the client design and deploy a solution supporting exponential growth without corresponding increase in overhead costs. With the help of Skuid (www.skuidify.com), OpenGate was able to deliver against all of client’s requirements in less than five months. The client estimated their average time for handling a medical claim has dropped from 15 minutes to less than five minutes.

“This is where, with strong design principles, deep business acumen and capable technology, we believe we can address any business challenge,” asserts Elmore.For the next three years, OpenGate is focused on being the model example and a thought leader in driving technology adoption with Salesforce. “We look forward to creating a team of business process designers who will focus on the intersection of business growth and technology capability to drive business value,” concludes Elmore.