The Aha Moment help him get this new venture off the ground. David shares that You know how they say that sometimes the best ideas come to “The AppExchange program accelerated our trajectory three you when you’re away from your desk? That’s how the idea for a to four to five years. We didn’t have to build a platform, which Forbes Cloud 100 company struck David Schmaier. would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars. We were able to use the Salesforce Platform.” At his very first Dreamforce conference in 2013, a light bulb went off in David’s head. Upon arriving at the event, he was Building Vlocity 100% on the Salesforce Platform prevented amazed by two things: first of all, the absolute size and scale of redundancies by leveraging the products and features that the Salesforce ecosystem. David says, “I was simply astonished Salesforce offers. For instance, if Vlocity needed an order object, by how successful and how big Salesforce customers and the they used the native Salesforce order object. The primary partner ecosystem had become.“ And second, “I saw many additional technologies applied to its industry applications are really great applications that were horizontal cross-industry apps specific to the needs of that industry. David uses an analogy to — you know, 10 or 12 CPQ software products, CTI middleware, the automotive aftermarket: Salesforce is the car, and Vlocity proposal generators, document management — and literally zero needed to put in a better engine or new stereo system. The car vertical industry-specific applications, and that presented the still has four wheels and drives, but it has a new engine (Vlocity) opportunity to me,” recalls David. that is plugged right in. This “100% additive” approach delivers industry-specific capabilities that customers want and ensures It was then that David knew what he had to do. With his idea that there are no redundancies. in mind and his expertise in building 20+ industry applications for the front office, he was certain that this new endeavor would Learning From the Journey find its home in the cloud. David believes that “It’s always good to have a pathfinder that you’re following.” The two companies that David modeled The Secret to Scaling Vlocity after were Veeva and Workday. By setting the bar high Driving scale is one of the biggest hurdles when launching a new and comparing Vlocity to others, the company had a North Star business. As someone who had done it several times before, to guide it along its journey. David knew that a synergistic partnership with Salesforce would 11