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Category Archives: FirstRain News

TOUCH ME: FirstRain is bringing touch-powered Customer Intelligence to the enterprise!

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As we saw last year, there’s been a massive wave of Fortune 500 companies adopting touch-based tablets and devices. One result of that has been the proliferation of a whole range of B2B iPad and smartphone apps from companies like us and salesforce.com to enable those mobile, touch-powered professionals with the intelligence and data they need to understand and engage their customers, as well as open up new opportunities.

However, there’s a second big enterprise trend that’s picking up momentum as well: that of large companies who are developing internal enterprise apps for touch-based tablets and devices, for use by their own enterprise sales and marketing teams.

And because it’s a need that more and more of our customers are requesting every day, we’re very excited to announce this morning the launch of FirstRain for Touch, a new, powerful and yet easy way to drop highly relevant customer intelligence for your sales and marketing teams into your enterprise iPad app—and the first enterprise customer intelligence solution built for the Salesforce Touch Platform.

Last fall, at their annual Dreamforce ‘12 conference, along with their high profile launch of Salesforce Touch, salesforce.com also announced the launch of the similarly named (but very different) “Salesforce Touch Platform.” And unlike Salesforce Touch—which is a downloadable app for iPad, iPhone and Android created for their users to easily access salesforce.com data and capabilities on their devices—the Salesforce Touch Platform is a Software Developer’s Kit that developers within a large enterprise can use to create their own, internal touch-device apps for their sales and marketing teams.

Our new FirstRain for Touch solution is an elegant and personalized set of components that have been optimized for use on touch-based devices, and can be easily dropped into enterprise apps created by companies, just like those developed using the Salesforce Touch Platform SDK. And the demand has been notable. For example, we have at least 3 large, current customers (all in the Fortune 500) who are each planning or have already created and deployed their own iPad apps for use by their own enterprise sales and marketing teams.

But perhaps one of the nicest aspects of this launch has been the opportunity to work with the great folks at salesforce.com. We have lots of clients in common and solutions that have always been highly symbiotic, and so this area is just one more place where we find common opportunity to help each other succeed. Our thanks to Clarence So, their Executive Vice President of Mobile Strategy, for his kind comments about our release: “It is exciting to see the rapid innovation that partners such as FirstRain are delivering on our trusted mobile platform, FirstRain for Touch will provide customers with the right intelligence to help them connect with their customers in entirely new ways and accelerate business success.”

If you’re interested in more information about FirstRain for Touch, let us know!

Happy 12th Birthday FirstRain India!

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It was the 12th anniversary of FirstRain India and all the Rainmakers contributed to make it an unforgettable event.

The celebration started with a cake cutting ceremony inside the office premises and then we all headed to the party venue “The Woods.” The sunny winter day, pool side view and non-stop great food added to the mood.

The fun started with games among the six event teams followed by a treasure hunt. Funny props were very popular throughout the event.
We were amazed to see how each team performed in the individual performance round. I must say we do have great talent at FirstRain.
Singing, mimicry of FR superstars along with enacting live moments from the office added color to the celebration.

After the well-spent hours in the sun with games and performances, it was the time to get recharged again so we all headed to the party hall. The evening was a BLAST! Awesome variety of drinks and snacks aside, there was great music which very quickly moved everyone to the dance floor. The energy was amazing and no one seemed in any hurry to head out for dinner. Finally, FirstRain India MD, Aparna Gupta had to announce a final 15-minute dance session with everyone on the floor before dinner. The dinner and dessert did not disappoint at all either. It was a perfect end to a rocking party.

The full day event brought us a great opportunity to interact with each other in an altogether different setting and also highlighted the hidden talent within each of us apart from performing best at our workstations. Each of us was handed a memento—a soft photo frame with a group photograph from the event.

In the end, we must say…

At FirstRain, it’s not only about working hard, it’s also about having fun at work!

Keep going Rainmakers.. Make the ‘FirstRain kite’ fly higher and higher across the roaring wind.

Not Just Another Day at FirstRain India…

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We had a very exciting day at the office in December. FirstRain India celebrated a group of employees who have been with FirsRain for over seven years! Each employee was honored for their commitment and hard work with a bouquet of flowers and a special lunch.

The event was a complete surprise to most of the team. On December 19th, around lunchtime, Chitra, our HR Manager announced a list of people who each were given a bouquet of flowers from Aparna Gupta, our India MD. The rest of the team really had no idea why they were receiving flowers until we suddenly looked around and realized who was being recognized. All of the people called out, had been at FirstRain the longest.

The lunch was very special, full of memories and nostalgia. We went through the hard times and the good times, but most importantly—the fun we have had through the journey of building FirstRain to what it is today. Interestingly enough, the majority of the recognized joined FirstRain as single people and now most are married with kids! They have been through many different roles, working with different managers throughout the company and truly have grown over the years.

In the midst of our tight work schedules, releasing deliverables, promising product outlook and anticipation of FirstRain becoming REALLY successful, this came up as a great surprise.

Congratulations to all of you for being a part of the core team of FirstRain and thanks a ton FirstRain for making us feel special!

Nominate FirstRain for the 2012 Crunchies Awards!

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Help nominate FirstRain and Penny for the 6th annual Crunchies Awards! The award ceremony recognizes the most captivating startups, internet and technology innovations of the year. It’s co-hosted by GigaOm, VentureBeat and TechCrunch.

The ceremony will take place January 31, 2013 at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. You can vote for FirstRain in the “Sexiest Enterprise Startup” and “Best Content Discovery Application” categories. You can also vote for Penny in the “CEO of the Year” category.

You may vote once a day until the cut off date, December 6th. Spread the word to your colleagues, families and friends!

Vote here to nominate FirstRain for the Sexiest Enterprise Startup!

Vote here to nominate FirstRain for the Best Content Discovery Application!

Vote here to nominate Penny for CEO of the Year!

Look, Up in the Sky: it’s a Bird! It’s a Plane … it’s FirstRain Performinator!

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The past few weeks have been extremely busy and exciting as we prepare for Dreamforce, which is now only a week away! But today, I have some other exciting news to share, the launch of our new solution—the FirstRain Performinator!

Performinator is our newest solution for delivering strategically tuned customer intelligence for major account sales and marketing teams right into their existing CRM, social enterprise platforms, smartphones and tablets. Performinator helps your entire team of sales and marketing pros understand their customers’ business as well as your superstars do. And for the thousands of early-adopter users who are already getting FirstRain Performinator today, it’s the ‘carrot‘ that gets your people engaged in and drives value from your CRM and platform investments. Don’t YOU want to ‘Be the Carrot‘? ;-)

Most sales and marketing teams don’t have the time to gather the deep knowledge of their customers and end-markets that’s needed to really challenge their customers, uncover opportunity and spot risks. FirstRain already delivers the right intelligence to help solve this challenge, but with Performinator we make it so easy, and so well-tuned to your customer markets that each of your users are transformed (no phone booth required) into your company’s go-to experts on your most significant customers.

In fact, at Dreamforce next week, leaders from GE Capital and FirstRain will be discussing the new solution and how they are embracing the carrot. If you’re interested in attending the session and learning more about Performinator, you can do so here.

Superman may use his super powers to fly, but Performinator uses its powers to transform your sales and marketing teams!

You Had Me At Hello. Smiling That Is.

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Dreamforce season is upon us! Attendees and Salesforce.com employees are talking about what they are wearing and not wearing (I really hope not!) to the event, the Dreamforce party app is hopping, SaaSy videos are going viral, animated gifs are turning up everywhere,  sessions are filling up fast and rumors are flying around.

So what are we doing in preparation? Well, some hard work of course as we coordinate our booth (#1626), our customer session [360° of Excellence: How GE Capital Drives ROI Through Customer Intelligence], our team schedules and our client appointments—but also some fun, because that is how we roll here @FirstRain …

If you’ve been following @FirstRain or Penny, Ryan or myself on Twitter, you may have noticed we’ve been tweeting out about our new customer intelligence Tumblr:  “You Had Me At Hello, Letters to Marc Benioff“, with a couple new posts a day.

So what exactly is it? You Had Me At Hello are letters directly from Penny to Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com’s CEO. They are ‘penned’ in Penny’s own voice—no marketing content editor behind the scenes—and are what our COO, YY Lee, recently called “like passing hallway notes between two CEOs”.

We have had a lot of positive feedback from our customers (including many who are mutual customers with Salesforce.com), along with many ”thanks for making me smile.” This ticks off our #1 objective as we all continue to be manically busy trying to prep for Dreamforce, deliver our updated AppExchange offering, work on a couple of new client SFDC implementations and continue to drive value to our customers rolling out tools like Sales Cloud.

Here are some highlighted posts from the Tumblr in the last week that might also make you smile:

To read the rest of the posts go to  #UHadMeAtHello! Read it, Tweet it, and Submit Your own Letter to Marc if you are so inclined.

View the full archive here.

FirstRain Heads to SLA2012!

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Next week SLA (Special Library Association) is hosting their annual conference in Chicago and FirstRain will be in attendance. Daniela, our Director of Business Development, MLIS, a long time member of SLA and champion of information professionals in the Enterprise will be attending and is looking forward to catching up with many of you there!

In addition to learning more about new trends and how information professionals are ensuring that they are “’future ready’ by exchanging ideas and connecting with thousands of fellow information professionals“, Daniela will be looking to meet up with information professionals who are currently working or are trying to get involved in Enterprise Social Business projects incorporating social enterprise software like Salesforce.com/Chatter, Yammer, SharePoint, Jive, IBM Connections, Tibco, Cisco Webex Social and others.

The role of the information professional is often an important one in these enterprise projects, and Daniela (who works directly with these vendors as FirstRain partners, and with the enterprise customers deploying these solutions) would like to see more information professionals involved and driving these projects.

SLA2012 is located at the McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois from July 15th-July 18, 2012. For more information on SLA2012 please visit their website.

If you are interested in touching base with Daniela please send her an email dbarbosa@firstrain.com or via twitter @danielabarbosa.

Announcing our New Product Release!

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I love release days. Not only is there the excitement of announcing great, new product features, but there’s a real thrill each time I see yet another amazing, customer-focused accomplishment for FirstRain. However, release days are exciting for our customers too, since it’s a reassurance that we are working hard for you and your business needs.

When I started at FirstRain (almost one year ago!), we had just announced the integration of our mobile platform for iPhone and Android devices. Since then I’ve seen the introduction of several new products, such as: the development of the iPad app, the introduction of the FirstRain ECI system, and more recently, the FirstTweets and visualization analytics integration. We’ve really come a long way in just under a year!

Today, we at FirstRain have put out our July 2012 Product Release, and with it we are adding some great new updates and additions to many of the great new features we’ve developed in the past year. This month’s release is all personalization. We’ve updated our iPad app, improving the in-app monitor experience, taking an already great app and making it even more powerful and useful. So if you’re a FirstRain user who hasn’t yet downloaded FirstRain for iPad, now’s a great time to do so!

We’ve also updated our iPhone and Android apps and added in some nice, new features throughout the product to better personalize and share your customer intelligence experience. This release focuses on taking what we already have that works well and making it even more personal.

For all of you who are FirstRain customers, I encourage you to check out these new updates and, as always, please let us know what you think!

Summer 2012 at FirstRain India

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The hottest summer months in Delhi are May and June, with temperatures going as high as 45 ⁰C (~113 ⁰F)! It only begins to cool down when the ‘First Rain’ of the monsoon season decides to descend and make the days cooler, greener and less dusty.

Besides the hot weather, June has been a busy month. The highpoint was a Kids@Work day that brought in about 20 Rainmaker’s kids, ranging from an age of six months to twelve years. The kids spent a good part of the day at FirstRain India. It was great fun to watch FirstRain parents and non-parents taking care of the little ones. I am very impressed (and proud) by how hands on all the Rainmaker parents are!

Below are some snapshots from the day:

Current and future Rainmakers work in perfect harmony

Who is the better programmer- father or son?

Going home a winner!

At FirstRain India we like to host numerous events that every Rainmaker can particiate in. We divide everyone into event teams (a lottery system) comprising folks from different departments, getting together to participate in fun, as well as competitive events, throughout the year. This allows people from different departments to come together and team up to excel in an entirely different setting. The events range from quiz competitions to ramp walks to decorate your bay and the events culminate with a prize trophy to the winning team at the annual offsite event. The new teams were created this summer and the first task assigned to them was to create a name, logo and punch line for their team.

Finally, June ended with a small party in our cafeteria for all the employees who had June birthdays. All the June birthdays gathered around the cake (including myself) and so a case for me of have your cake and eat it too!



FirstRain Starts off the Summer…

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Lots of exciting things happening at FirstRain lately! With a mixture of some great new customers, fun company events, new FirstRain faces, giving the office a fresh, new look, and a big award announcement— June has been busy and we’re only eight days into the month!

First, we announced this week that FirstRain is a finalist for the 2012 American Business Awards in the new product or service of the year, business-to-business products category. As a finalist, FirstRain will either be the Gold, Silver or Bronze Stevie Award winner in the program. The ABA will present the awards at two award ceremonies, the ABA traditional banquet on June 18th in New York, and a new tech awards event on Monday, September 17th in San Francisco. A fantastic honor for us.

Last week, the FirstRain team held one of our traditional potluck lunches. Jordy brought in a special French dessert, baked by his mother, who is in town visiting from France. Our special guest was Eugene’s new 1 month old daughter. Our potluck lunch turned into a baby shower, welcoming her to the FirstRain team— our youngest and smallest team member yet!

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Along with Eugene’s beautiful new daughter, we are excited to welcome two new additions to FirstRain this summer, Patrick and Sebastian. Patrick is a student at San Jose State and is working with Eugene and Connie in our accounting department. Sebastian (who worked at FirstRain last summer) will be assisting Ryan and the marketing team this summer, before starting college at NYU this Fall. We’re thrilled to have them.

Last night, some of the FirstRain team participated in the annual Splash and Dash race at Stevens Creek Reservoir in Cupertino, CA. We had 9 rainmakers competing in the race, Doug and Aaron finished first for the relay teams, but everyone did a great job and all finished the race strong. Afterwards, everyone went back to Penny’s house for a barbeque. We will partake in the event again in August, when our east coast team is in town to join in on the fun.

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Looks like another FirstRain summer is definitely off to a fun and full-forced start!