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AppFusions: Pioneering Modern Integrated Digital Experiences
Ellen Feaheny, Co-Founder and CEOAppFusions believes that by integrating silo’d system workflows and real-time data together, with common digital experiences, business objectives and context, enterprise corporations will work better, smoother, and faster.
Breaking the Acceptance of Enterprise Silos
AppFusions’ genesis began in early 2010 when the founders noticed numerous problems associated with how integrations were getting done—or more likely—not getting done when using enterprise platform systems. In general, enterprise systems did not integrate or extend, they had clunky user experiences, required pervasive data synchronization, and included much process redundancy between different systems.
Ellen Feaheny, Patrick Li, David Simpson, all co-founders of AppFusions, simply thought, “Why don’t platform vendors make it easier for their customers? It is ludicrous that so many customers become ‘hostage’ to a platform that can’t integrate easily, and that companies were wasting a lot of time and money internally with so many un-integrated process inefficiencies.”
“We thought there must be a better or easier way, which became our ‘thesis’ and mission goal,” explains Ellen. And that was that. AppFusions incorporated 3 days later.
Their mission was to package common solutions and embolden host platform usage via strategic integrations. AppFusions started with the Atlassian platforms, then Jive platform, then IBM Connections and DX platforms, and finally—in 2017, AppFusions’ AlohaDXP platform which brings together the founders’ best years of experiences to drive a mainstream agenda.
“Our solutions had a requirement of solving any unique integration problem end-to-end, meaning delightful user experiences with deep workflow UX, SSO between the integrated systems, and analytics.” Performance, security, and authentication—each arguably hard nuts, were also required inclusive considerations for our solutions. No half-efforts were allowed, as we knew all too well that “the devil is in the details,” explains Ellen.
The SaaS Boom Proliferation
Today, with the proliferation of SaaS and cloud technology, integration has become one of the biggest strategic pain points for CIOs. “In comes the cloud and out goes the control on how to manage the systems,” quips Ellen. Worse still, enterprises leverage a stack of products from various vendors only to realize that cloud integrations especially can be very complex or difficult to maintain.
AppFusions enables, optimizes, and facilitates system integrations, communications, and collaborations. “We help CIOs manage the different application integration needs and requirements easier, and then empower the customers’ IT to regain control over their enterprise architecture strategy. This is vital in today’s enterprise networks, which have to be integrated with various point systems that serve specific purposes,” says the CEO.
AppFusions’ technologies run continually in the IBM Cloud, allowing for secure scalable data center distributions to customers world-wide
In general, platform vendors’ reliably do not prioritize productized, thorough, and UX immersive 3rd-party integrations, and instead, vendors reliably sell more silos (via their platform as one) into the enterprise, causing even more integration demand in the industry.
Since 2010, AppFusions began productizing holistic integrated solutions, bringing together old and new systems, processes, data, and people within common platforms via deep, vetted, and proven workflow integration solutions. By solutions, AppFusions have three main product-lines:
1. AppSpokes integration app services, an iPaaS architecture and family (25+) of end-to-end packaged integrated app “services” that can be securely made. available in
2. AlohaDXP, a no-code/low-code integrated digital experiences and workplace platform that brings together content, data, and disparate 3rd-party system experiences (via AppSpokes) into unlimited contextual mix-and-match purpose-driven spaces or portals (depending on the use-case).
3. Atlassian-server-based integration apps, AppFusions’ flagship and sustained solution apps that have withstood the test of time (since 2010, ongoing). In fact, these initial products served as key PM experience and design inputs to the later AppSpokes and AlohaDXP micro-services solutions.
Staying true, all of these solutions have complemented AppFusions’ vision, plans, and evolved trajectory, and common mission: “to bridge business, engineering, and collaboration systems with mixed-technology and contextual integrated application solutions to allow enterprises to work better, together.”
IBM Cloud: An Enterprise- Grade Cloud
Via AppSpokes and AlohaDXP, AppFusions mixes multiple system workflow experiences into a real-time “single pane of glass” contextual interfaces. The host-platform for which “the glass” resides could be AlohaDXP or others e.g., IBM Connections, IBM Commerce or DX, or others. The growing inter-mixed application flavors include apps by IBM, Microsoft, Atlassian (Jira and Confluence), Salesforce, Dropbox, Box, Google, GitHub, GitLab, Slack, Alfresco, Zendesk, ServiceNow, and more.
Below the surface, AppFusions’ technologies run continually in the IBM Cloud, allowing for secure scalable data center distributions to customers world-wide. Their solutions can be deployed via different models, based on a customer’s needs or requirements:
• A multi-tenant public cloud environment, or
• A large-scale private dedicated cloud environment, or
• On-premise with a same-codebase containerized version of the services for local installs in a corporation’s own data center environment.
The Market is only validating
The AppFusions’ team have focused on far-reaching cloud and hybrid integrated web, portal and digital experience strategies for years now.
AppFusions’ no-code/low-code AlohaDXP platform takes the concept to the cutting edge of the industry, quickly, by embedding a large and growing AppSpokes integration app portfolio. In addition, AlohaDXP includes content curation, business intelligence (behavioral and data injestion), integrated app SSO, messaging, enterprise directory management and roles, AI analysis and machine learning and much more.
With AlohaDXP, in days or weeks, an enterprise can spawn dozens of newly polished, working, secure, and deeply integrated spaces or portals. Further, via AlohaDXP’s built-in enterprise architecture framework, enterprises can skip building the complex “technical underbelly”, and instead focus on the cross-functional business requirements from constituents who will use the quick-to-develop web experiences.
AppSpokes and AlohaDXP are evolutions already of continual real-world feedback, with active roadmaps that are steadily appended by customer inputs and demand. The model allows customers to be deeply engaged in both AppFusions’ product plans and their evolving software development kit (SDK), together.
“We have been told multiple times already that the AlohaDXP strategy and platform can ultimately shave off 2-3 years of IT internal development efforts and risks along the way,” exclaims Ellen.
With AlohaDXP, clients can have a central web interface that allows them to drag and drop from different integration apps and content elements, and build out a web space that has all these integrated systems available in a single interface, with all real-time data and interactions possible. Further, AlohaDXP has IBM Watson running against the data to automatically tag content using Watson NLU (natural language understanding), among other. Over time, as a person continues to use the system, powerful metrics about activity, content, and engagement can be derived across users and processes in the system. This in turn can bring more insights to the forefront.
With continual real-world feedback, AppSpokes and AlohaDXP are steadily developed and evolved by customer inputs, demand, and current roadmaps. This way customers can be heavily engaged in the ongoing product development with continual iteration and innovation, together.
Show vs Tell
With dozens of solutions in AppFusions’ growing portfolio already, client requirement discussions often start in the format of “I want what you have in your video here, yet with these changes.” Ellen proudly explains that the company sells visual, video-able experiences, and that a customer has often seen a video(s) before even contacting AppFusions. “We like to SHOW our customers what they can do with AlohaDXP, not just TELL them.”
Moving forward, Ellen believes that customers need not have to reinvent every wheel. With strong scalable, enabling technologies and frameworks that extend all the way to the UX/UI and hard network and authentication nuts, enterprise IT organizations can drive a faster, more predictable, sustained journey and strategy for success.
“While it is difficult to track and stay up to speed with emerging trends in enterprise architecture, change continues to happen whether you get on board or not. We are trying to be ahead of that to enable and help you evolve,” concludes the CEO.
