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Dazeworks: The Salesforce MVP Advantage

CIO Vendor In a truly customer driven economy, success comes to those companies who are in touch with their customers round the clock, satisfying all their product and service specific needs. To attain success and fulfill their customers’ expectations and provide them the right solution, every business entity needs to know the art of managing the organization’s relationship with the customers and prospective clients. Customer Relationship management (CRM), a widely used system in today’s hyper-competitive world is a strategic means to develop strong relationships with customers by providing a platform to assess their individual needs and behaviors. To deliver the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software entirely over the internet, Marc Ben off founded Salesforce.com with the radical departure of the traditional server model especially for business software. Since its inception in 1999, Salesforce has achieved phenomenal growth. From $4 billion upstart in 1999, Salesforce has built a commanding lead in the $20 billion market for Customer Relationship Management, outselling SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM. As the clear market leader in the industry, Salesforce is also the most innovative company enhancing its systems almost three times a year. But due to its constantly evolving and technologically advancing nature, Salesforce users find it difficult to cope with the continuous change in the business environment. In this case working with a consultant, not only helps businesses to get a perspective that they had never thought of or understood and get a vision of where they need to be, but also helps them to find success with Salesforce.

With a rapid career ascent and deep-rooted passion for Salesforce, Shivanath Devinarayanan founded his own consultancy of pure-play Salesforce services provider-Dazeworks in Kochi. Being a partner for all things Salesforce – be it development, implementation or expert architectural guidance, Dazeworks is a real-world consultant that understands the challenges faced by its clients, advises them on the best steps to tackle the roadblocks and works towards achieving it with their team. The founding story of Dazeworks tells a tale of audacity and persistence. In order to a get better understanding of it, let us trace back Shivanath’s Salesforce journey.

The Salesforce Journey

Back in 2010, when Shivanath graduated from Mahatma Gandhi University,Kerala, he had no idea that his learning curve will change into his career path. “Ever since my first job, I fell in love with Salesforce and in spite of less relevance of the platform at that time, I took the risk to invest my career in it. And with the craving to learn more about the platform, I shifted to Gurgaon as Lead Associate Simplion Technologies,” Shivanath expounds. Later, Shivanath enhanced his skills as a Senior Developer in Groupon,one of the largest users of Salesforce in the world. Along the way, his thirst for Salesforce was not quenched and spending time with the Salesforce success community and resources available through Force.com helped him to earn distinctions as both a Salesforce.com MVP and a Force.com MVP. That was a turning point in his career. And finally with the culmination of his pool of experiences, the dream of starting his own company was translated into reality with the setting up of Dazeworks in April 2015. This turned out to be the best decision he took and since then there has been no looking back.

Although the company had to face initial hiccups in terms of dealing with complex legal law, taxation, red tapism in paper works and managing finances, Shivanath learnt swiftly and managed to overcome the challenges through his constant learning experiences. Founded on the principles of quality, service and excellence, the company has grown from strength to strength. Shivanath rewinds how Dazeworks was incorporated one and a half year ago with a team of only 2 people at Centre A Offices – a premium serviced office space located in Kochi. Soon many MVP’s with cumulative experience of the Salesforce platform joined the company including Vinay Chaturvedi and Deepak Anand. Internationally, Dazeworks expanded its offices to Dubai and San Francisco and in India it has offices in Kochi and Bangalore.

Shivanath strongly believes that if you have a very good team, you will have a very good client base and keeping his team secure is his core principle. The company holds an expert team of eminent certified developers, architects and consultants which paved the way for the growth of the company. A reason for Dazework’s rapid growth is also its strong portfolio of services. Through its expertise delivery model and through experienced people, Dazeworks works hard to deliver everything under the Salesforce umbrella to provide perfect customer satisfaction, from hiring a dedicated developer resource to providing expert architectural advice. The platform offers robust services to the client right from the beginning of their project and guides them till the end so that they can ensure a better ROI. “We are the experts and we provide a long term solution to our customers with dedicated resource for projects with the right skills and expertise,” Shivanath adds.

“Dazeworks has an expert team of fully certified Salesforce developers and consultants who render scalable business architecture leadership and insights to the clients in order to get the most out of their Salesforce investment.”


Roster of Services Rendered by a Talented Team of Experts

Today companies are pervaded with complex business challenges such as hurdles of changed management, lack of industry experience, strict delivery deadlines and the trust factors. Through its Salesforce development services, Dazeworks helps companies by deploying the best possible solutions and offers flexible engagement models and extensive support service. It also moulds their Salesforce instance to fit their unique needs and create add-on applications that are hosted on Salesforce infrastructure with the Salesforce1 platform which can be easily integrated into an existing Salesforce application.

The company is also equipped with fully certified Salesforce developers who render business architecture leadership and insights to clients in order to get the most of their Salesforce investment. The Dazeworks team makes Force.com easy and user friendly to ensure better decision making for their clients for a better future. Also it provides customized solutions to both types of clients- for small projects which needs complete technical guidance as well as the other, such as longer projects for which Dazeworks needs to assign full time developers. "The work that we have done with our existing clients has revolved around mentoring and managing their in-house teams, presenting technical design sessions, architecting technical solutions and leading custom development of solutions and interfaces," Shivanath elaborates.

In addition to these services, Dazeworks developers also guide the clients on how to implement and customize Salesforce to eliminate the complexities faced by them during setup and transition. The company's implementation services range from enterprise architecture planning, configuration and customization, data migration and system integration to reporting, analytics and support services. Along with these, there are a plethora of other services that Dazeworks render to its clients. It includes Salesforce Consulting, Appex change App Development, Salesforce Lightning, Salesforce Admin & Developer Support, System Integration and Data Migration, etc.

Giving Back To the Society

Apart from adhering to the business principles followed by Salesforce, Dazeworks has taken another important leaf out of the Salesforce book and thus focuses on giving back to the society. The Pledge 1% model of Salesforce, developed by Marc Benioff (CEO, Salesforce.com), encourages all entrepreneurs and their companies to commit important resources (1 % equity, 1% product and 1% time) to support integrating philanthropy and community service into their business from an early stage. By adopting the Salesforce 1-1-1 Philanthropic Model from day one, Dazeworks has become the trailblazer for building a new competitive advantage by inculcating a culture that is not only committed to the bottom line and growth, but also to the importance of giving back and showing corporate social responsibility.

Dazeworks has come a long way since it started in the market and Shivanath gives credit to his team of experts. "The level of expertise that we bring is unparalleled across any service company. Unlike other companies, we give utmost important to each of our clients regardless of the value of their project," Shivanath explains. With a holistic approach, custom made solution and providing a very high quality service, the company has delivered over 50 Salesforce engagements till now. The company has gained a whole host of clientele owing to the quality of its services. Some of them include Marsh Clear Sight- a subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan, Talent Rover- the largest recruitment solutions on the Salesforce platform, Help shift and round Corner- enterprise CRM Solution for Nonprofits.

Blazing Towards a Brighter Future

The bigger a company gets, the harder it is to innovate and move quickly. Proving this statement wrong, Salesforce continues to reign as Forbes’ Most Innovative Company for the fourth straight year. And as Dazeworks is closely aligned with Salesforce ecosystem, it is very keen on ensuring that they don’t get outdated by the technologies. Shivanath further adds “Our growth is to ensure that with regards to technology and Salesforce, we are the leading edge for everything that happens in Salesforce.” In near future, the company’s vision is to enhance its technologies into Mobile, Artificial Intelligence and IoT.

Going forward, the company aims to partner with Salesforce India in order to enter the Indian markets and serve the Indian clients and also expand the Pledge 1% model within India as well. Lastly Shivanath wants to contribute for his workforce. “We want to provide a platform for our team members to experiment in their entrepreneurial journey, help them realize their aim and encourage their products and plans,” Shivanath concludes. The company is moving towards scripting many more success stories for itself and the future certainly holds tremendous promise for Dazeworks.