Brown-Forman moved from slow mainframe systems to Salesforce, building 45 apps in under three years. The shift gave business users tools to build their own solutions while IT moved from gatekeeper to partner, using point-and-click automation and APIs to ship faster.
45 apps in production in less than three years.
October 5, 2015.
Old it. I think of mainframes.
Complexity comes to mind right away.
Order taking, bureaucratic, slow to react. Big budget, monolithic, large applications, saying no to people.
I think the new age of it is different.
New it to me is collaborative, fast.
What people need, rapid development, what people want.
Being able to say yes.
The role of the CIO has changed dramatically. I can't bury my head in the back office. We have to look to the future in different ways. Salesforce.com brings us into the world of being business people, not technology.
It's been a massive switch.
Brown Forman was founded on the concept of putting whiskey into sealed bottles. We're an innovative company at our heart and one that owns fantastic beverage alcohol brands that we're very proud of. Now suddenly we were at a very different pace. Touching consumers and dealing with consumers on a daily basis is very, very different than our older business model.
If you're going to continue to help, we need to change this. Change is not going to stop.
What has changed for it is that we now, for the first time, have a seat at the table.
We're going through an app revolution. We need apps to do everything from finance to HR to supply chain to our production operations. When I first saw Force.com, i actually couldn't believe that you could do something that fast. I'm like, no way. I mean, but it really was, you.
Can do anything that you need your business to do. It lets us write once and deploy everywhere.
Is being able to automate business processes in a completely point and click fashion.
The aha moment was just beginning to understand how simple our environment could become.
We see something we want to do. Oh, there's an API for that. It's just like a kind of grab and go.
With Force, we're able to build applications that are straightforward, intuitive and easy to use on top of everything mobile.
As a developer, what I love about the SalesforceOne platform is you don't have to do anything else to worry about mobile development. You've already written it, it already runs.
If we're building applications that require somebody to be sitting at their DEs making.
A mistake, we're very lean IT organization.
Where we used to program, we don't have to program anymore.
With Force.com you can be a regular business analyst and you can still build a great application that's going to solve.
A lot of problems. You can sit with the business, gather the requirements, show them, make changes on the fly. Really? You already did that? Sure.
Those victories allow us to get closer and closer to the people we need to sit by to help change the company.
With Force.com it makes us feel like we're superheroes because we're making applications that actually have a business impact.
They asked for it by name. I want a Salesforce app.
Everybody in Brown Foreman touches Salesforce every day. It's a huge part of the fabric of the company, and to me, that's extremely powerful.
This is the new way of doing business. I was in the business of saying no.
We've changed exactly how it is seen.
The sheer fact that we did 45 apps that are in production in less than three years is amazing.
The way you get the seat at any table is showing your worth. And by using salesforce.com we've shown our worth.
Sam.
