Salto: NetSuite Deployment & Change Management Made Easy (ft. Co-Founder and CTO, Gil Hoffer)

Osar Iyamu (0:55):

So what people don’t know about that is that that’s actually one of the best crowdsourcing tool out there. So what it does, it basically asks, it asks you to identify a specific object in a series, in a series of images, correct? So find a car on this image and keep asking you for more work to do, to identify a car in all these images. So the problem that platform like Google is trying to solve is that machines, machines cannot read images, right? But yet people are searching for things that may be in images, right? So the idea of using reCAPTCHA is they basically said, they said, want to use the entire internet to solve that problem. So if we engage the entire internet to help us identify specific objects in images, we can go faster at reading all the images on the web.

So that’s what crowdsourcing is: They took a specific task of identifying objects in images and use the entire internet users to do that job. That’s exactly what crowdsourcing is, right? So when it comes to IT work, the way I see it today, like IT, this domain is probably the one that I’ve seen the most changes in the past 10 years. You know, we’ve seen like, you know, the big data, big data we’ve seen, um, blockchain, we’ve seen, uh, the use of API. That’s now kind of mainstream. We’ve seen machine learning, AI technologies.

So think of someone that’s managing an IT department or HR department, trying to keep up with all this skillset, because with every new technology trend comes a set of skillset that you need to have to leverage that technology, right? So it’s crazy.

So yeah, every two or three months, you have to basically retrain your entire staff, right?

On a new thing. And who knows what’s gonna come up next in, in two or three months, right? At this point in time, people like the developers, they’ll figure out a way to, to crowdsource knowledge at scale that’s where you see platforms or forums like Stack Overflow. That’s probably the best forum for developers out there.

They figure out a way to bring all the knowledge together into one same place so they can crowdsource knowledge very easily. So that solved the problem of saying, “I have a problem. Let me see how many people have faced this problem in the past, or I’ve documented a solution that I can leverage.”
So that’s cool. That works perfectly. The reason we decided to take that approach for OdeCloud and build a community around NetSuite is that beyond knowing, beyond having the solution, we know to train basic for Google to find images from your search, they have to be able to identify objects in those images.

That’s the problem. But now the task still remains. Someone has to go there and do the work. Someone has to go there and take that picture and say, there’s a current in this, in this image and the current that image, right? So the knowledge is not enough for most businesses, knowing that you have knowing that this is the solution is just not enough for them to have the value they need, right? So we decided to build a community so we can crowdsource ideas, solutions very quickly within the community. But we also decided to have a NetSuite service attached to it.

So it’s a straight line from getting that solution, that idea, or testing out a couple of ideas. Once you have the best solution, then bringing that solution to a group that can actually execute on building that technology for the client.

That’s where OdeCloud becomes very powerful because it’s not just about crowdsourcing ideas and just getting people to help you out. It’s also being able to get the right expert to go into your system and execute on that specific feature that you need to have. So that’s the way we kind of pitch it — is really, we build a community to be very fast in getting knowledge and we build services to make sure that knowledge is not something that the customers know, then they have to go figure out someone to do it for them — is that you get the knowledge and you also get the, the expertise and the expert to help build it in your system. So it’s a straight line from knowledge to actually having that tool or that feature in your NetSuite account. So that’s kind of how we summarize crowdsourcing in our specific scenario, right? Does that make sense?

Angelo Mendoza (05:26):
Yeah. No, that totally makes sense. And I think, you know, going back to the original question and trying to get the bottom line here, like, how has OdeCloud, would you say confirmed that crowdsourcing in the IT world works? You know what I mean? Cause before when we started, it was kind of theoretical. We were just kind of like, oh, we’ll see if this thing works, but how do you think, you know, we’ve proven that crowdsourcing can work in it, by using the OdeCloud platform.

Osar Iyamu (05:54):
Yeah. I mean, we see that every day, like every project, every project that we have right now with all the clients that subscribe to our managed service, um, platform, they, each project starts with, “Hey guys, we have this customer that want this integration, for example, integrate this platform with NetSuite. Have you guys already done this before?” Yes.

“If you have done this, do you have an idea of, you know, eye level plan or project plan that we can put in place for this implementation?” That’s like a five minutes discussion. And before even know someone say, “Hey, I’ve done this in the past with this client, with this two exact software could be anything, could be Braintree to NetSuite, Shopify to NetSuite, whatever that is.”

And that person basically just tell you, here’s what you need to do. All the different steps. Here’s your, you know, first phase of the project, your second phase, third phase, and here’s your, you know, your go life prep, here’s your test cases that you need to roll out.
And that’s something that we instantly provide to that customer in the next five minutes of that requirements coming up. So think of, if you had to engage a team to do that, that don’t have access to all these people that have probably done this project in the past, you have to come up with, okay, let’s talk about requirement gathering.

Let’s talk about project planning. What are the task going to put in place? Or like, what are people involved that itself is just a week or two of just planning the project. So now we have the project plan. We have all the different stages that we need to follow to get, to go from initial point to the end of the project. Now it’s just about going back to the customer and say, “Hey, here is the plan. We need two or three people from your team, from the finance team, from the sales team, from the pushing team.”

And they’re gonna, they’re gonna be involved at these different stages of the project. Here’s the plan: Let’s, let’s get ready and start working on the, on the, on, on the execution. So that’s the first part of crossing that we leverage a lot is really templatized project. We’ve done this in the past. We know where the issues are. We know where the, we know where we need to spend the most time we have that knowledge already. Let’s just kick up the project. Then once you start working on the project, there’s so many things that can be known that can happen randomly, you know, issues that may be from, you know, a specific customer account.

If you ask someone that’s working on the IT department or NetSuite, you know, admin to fix that issue himself, you’ll probably spend two or three weeks just kind of, kind of figure out what the issue is and what, where is that issue coming from?

So again, our, our rule here is that if you have to spend on a five minutes thinking about a problem or an issue, then the next minute after that five minutes is going back to the community, putting the message there — you can, you, you can keep, you can go back to that problem and try to solve your own, but at least you have like hundreds of people thinking about that issue while you solve it, or why you take a break or why you go out, take a walk, you know, try, you know, breathe and kinda get all the things in your head, come back fresh. Reset, right?

And now give the problem to a different group of people with a fresh view on that issue. And once you come back from that little reset, you may have a bunch of solutions already proposed in that thread. So we see that every day. So it’s not something that we see happen year happens all the time. And we are able to, we are able to deliver projects in just a matter of days, few weeks, as opposed to months for other NetSuite partners or other internal team doing the same work. So that’s really, for us, what we’ve seen the most valuable — is being able to go from, start to finish in the project in just a matter of days.