Scene from a Trackvia video
Listen to my conversation with Matt McAdams, CEO of TrackVia, which provides a cloud-based application development platform that’s popular with business users.
In this podcast, find out why business users are turning to web-based cloud solutions to set up the applications they need, and learn what IT departments can do to make sure those applications remain compliant with their security and governance obligations.
Listen to or download the 7:28 minute podcast below:
—Transcript—
PW: Matt, I know you’re going to share with us some results of a survey you’ve done recently about your customers’ experiences of using the cloud to build their applications. But before we get into that, just tell us a little bit about TrackVia, because I know there are a lot of cloud-based application builders around. So what’s different, what’s distinctive, about what TrackVia offers?
MM: What’s different about TrackVia is that our application platform was designed for business users. So we provide a simple data management platform, like an online database, that allows business users to create a data model, or upload information from a spreadsheet, or wherever it might come from. And then we wrap around that pretty easy-to-use features that business users want to interact with their data — things like dashboards, and semantic search, and data alerts, change tracking.
So it’s a platform that, once your information is in and relationships are set up, it’s pretty easy to manage things like workflow, or ticket tracking, or helpdesk, inventory tracking, all without getting IT involved. On the other hand, it also has the security, and reliability, and audit trails, and change tracking that IT departments like. So to boil it down, it’s easy enough to use for business users, who typically drive the adoption of TrackVia, but also can be championed by IT, who are more concerned with security and reliability, and things like that.
So when you went out and did this survey recently, what sort of findings did you have? Did you get any unexpected answers?
Yes, we’re always surprised to see what our customers are doing with TrackVia — the types of apps they’re building and the extent that they incorporate TrackVia into their business processes. But, to answer your question specifically, one of the things that came out of this was, how quickly they were able to set up apps. Now these are not IT people. In fact, half of them identified themselves in the bottom half of technical sophistication even among non-business users. So they’re not technically — well, they’re forward thinking, but they’re not technically savvy white-collar workers. Yet, five out of six of them set up their TrackVia app in less than a week. Sixty percent of them set it up in less than a day, and half of them did that with only community-based customer support.
So 33% said they used no help or resources at all, they just used the user interface and the intuitive design that we’ve been aiming at. And this isn’t unique to TrackVia. I think in the last few years, a lot of web-based apps have become designed to be more intuitive for its business users. And our results show that’s working with, like I said, a third of them not needing any help and half of them requiring at least only ad-hoc help, or online support communities, and things like that.
Well, I think that’s the sort of experience that people are looking for from the cloud now, isn’t it? Very much a sort of walk-up-and-go kind of experience, rather than having to get in a line and wait for some expert to come along and do everything for you. So it’s good to see that you’re giving them that experience.
I believe that there was also this feeling that the ability to get something done faster was a lot more important than the financial element? In terms of, people are not going to the cloud to save money — which is the perception that’s out there, the cloud is being taken up because people are just trying to save money — but in the case of your users, they were trying to save time more than money?
That’s right. Only 16% …
