2020 Tonkean Year-End Review: Exciting Developments On The Road To SaaS 2.0
The opportunity in front of us is to manifest a better future of work. We’ve never been more excited about answering that call.
2020 has been memorable mostly for the wrong reasons. But amid the turmoil, uncertainty, loss and sadness, there have been some bright spots. For example, the world of software took several large leaps in its ongoing march toward full digital transformation — a transformation with the potential to make more enjoyable and efficient not only our companies but our day-to-day lives.
The most recent and highly publicized of these “leaps” was no doubt Salesforce’s acquisition of Slack. It signaled that enterprises are coming to more tangibly appreciate the importance of building software that’s capable of meeting people where they’re at. As our founder and CEO Sagi Eliyahu put it in a blog post, the acquisition brings us closer to “SaaS 2.0,” which is a world wherein “users will be able to execute quality work without leaving their preferred interface.”
“This next wave of SaaS will be less about where software is run,” Sagi writes, “And more about how it is leveraged holistically, with a focus on where people work.”
This, in our view, is a sign that the software world is moving closer to achieving its true promise, which is working for people, rather than forcing people to work for software. That’s something we were encouraged to see at Tonkean not only for the societal implications, but sort of selfishly, too. Providing organizations with the means to meet their employees where they’re at — namely, by establishing a new standard for operations in the enterprise that streamlines and aligns processes end-to-end — is central to our company mission, which we’ve been working to accomplish for many years. It’s encouraging to see major industry players catching up.
This year was not only memorable for advancements in the market, however. Internally we, too, made remarkable progress. We greatly improved the flexibility, accessibility, and general firepower of our no-code platform. We garnered national press, completed our Series A, wrote eBooks, tripled the size of our team, and partnered with some of the world’s most influential companies. We partnered, too, with nonprofits from around the world to help them optimize their operations.
As our employees prepare to celebrate the end of the year, we wanted to take a step back and share a few of the year’s developments we’re most proud of, along with why exactly we’ve never been more inspired or excited about the work we’re doing as a company.
Growing excitement about Tonkean, our mission, and our space.
In April, we officially announced the completion of our Series A, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The round was not only an investment in our continued ability to deliver for companies and employees a smarter, more empathetic, and customizable way to work, but another affirmation of the importance of that mission — of creating a better future of work.
Additional affirmations of — and signs of excitement about — the work we’ve been doing continued to roll in throughout the summer.
- Sagi was featured speaking on elements of our mission and the problems we’re solving in publications such as Marker, Fast Company, and Crunchbase.
- We were shortlisted for the 2020 Cloud Awards.
- And in November, we were featured in Gartner’s 2020 Market Guide for Intelligent Business Process Management Suites as a prominent vendor in the “Intelligent Business Process Management Suite (iBPMS) market” supporting “the full cycle of business process and decision, discovery, analysis, design, implementation, execution, monitoring and optimization.”
Even more exciting were the reactions fielded from folks who use our solutions and work with our team. At the 2020 Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) conference, Michael Levy — Legal Technology Program Manager at Google — shared in a presentation how Google had leveraged Tonkean to begin to eliminate the need for change management, as well as remove IT dependencies for things like conflict waiver approvals, outside counsel engagements, and matter creation.
Sagi was featured speaking on elements of our mission and the problems we’re solving in publications such as Marker, Fast Company, and Crunchbase.
He estimated that using Tonkean reduced the number of hours team members spent on tasks by 20–40%, and could create savings for the department of as much as $1.6M per year.
Huge improvements to the Tonkean platform
Relocated from their Tel-Aviv office to their living rooms, our unflappable engineers persisted through adversity to ship powerful new platform features and functionalities.
Here are a few that we’re most proud of:
- Improvements to enable business operations teams to orchestrate more complex processes — and solve mission-critical operational challenges — without any code. This year we made it even easier for Tonkean users who aren’t developers to orchestrate complex, mission-critical processes without code. For example, we improved our formula builder by adding formula types (more formulas means more customization when building modules) and by making more elegant and streamlined our UI for designing business logic and orchestrating processes. We built matched entities and debugging capabilities to our modules. We also provided users more powerful form builders and form types. (For many of our users, forms are the cornerstone of the modules they build.) For example, Tonkean users can now include in their modules forms that accommodate multiple value fields; tabular forms; continuous forms; and more.
- Functionalities to better meet users where they’re at. Tonkean developers took steps this year to make the Tonkean platform truly data-source agnostic, adding or further strengthening integrations with thousands of systems and tools — including, of course, Microsoft, Google Suite, Slack/MS-Teams, and Salesforce. In addition to the integrations, we also added functionalities to reach users in their preferred work environments with richer messages and more “out of the box” interactions. How Tonkean interacts with users is now even more intelligently determined by user preferences.
- Improvements to security and encryption functionality for Enterprise IT. This year we also made it possible to encrypt data to support operations that involve sensitive information. Users can likewise define inside modules exactly what type of data they’re storing and exactly how long they want Tonkean to hold onto it. Perhaps even more importantly, we added environments and version control capabilities to bolster the trustworthiness of Tonkean’s no-code technology in the eyes of IT — specifically as a viable means of enabling the business. These capabilities that a truly enterprise-grade solution needs, and they’re coincidentally what most no-code solutions lack.
- Enhancements to accommodate many different types of data — be they structured or unstructured. Tonkean users can now utilize and incorporate into their modules a huge variety of data types — from structured data (such as data sourced from forms and from systems) to unstructured data (NLP, OCR, etc.).
These investments further increase the scope of the workflows users can orchestrate with Tonkean; make even more airtight the security of user data; and, of course, better empower operation teams to build, test, and deploy their own end-to-end solutions while freeing developers and IT from creating or maintaining custom integrations for other teams.
These investments further increase the scope of the workflows users can orchestrate with Tonkean
All told, they make more powerful the technological means by which our users are manifesting SaaS 2.0.
Cultivating the operations community and creating real change.
Months ago, we put into motion plans for Changemakers 2020, a week-long hackathon-style event designed to connect non-profit organizations with highly skilled operations professionals, both from Tonkean and the larger operations community. The goal was to help nonprofits innovate ways to overcome key operational challenges that they perhaps didn’t have the means or technical expertise to overcome on their own.
In a year as dark and dismal as this one, we saw Changemakers as a means of volunteering our skills and knowledge to organizations on the front lines of making the world a better, lighter place.
Changemakers 2020 wrapped up last week. And we’re delighted to report that the volunteers, makers and nonprofits we brought together achieved even more than we thought possible. They not only created solutions that will tangibly improve the operations of the participating nonprofits moving forward; they also exemplified the importance of investing in this form of volunteering and of empowering the operations function more generally.
Starting with the opening ceremonies, for five days straight, “makers” from Tonkean and from around the operations community collaborated with the heads of participating nonprofits to help them identify and implement the most fitting solutions for their specific problems.
Participating nonprofits — which included organizations as varied as the League of United Latin American Citizens, GeoHazards International, and Global Peace Foundation — arrived to the hackathon with dilemmas that demanded operational expertise: cross-functional workflows that needed to be re-orchestrated; disparate data systems that lacked a single source of truth; systemic inefficiencies that had grown over time and needed to be rooted out; technology gaps that had widened into chasms that needed to be bridged.
All left, come the end of the week, with solutions that were not only innovative, but customized to their unique circumstances, systems, preferences, and needs.
Changemakers 2020, at the end of the day, proved a week-long case study on the importance of operations as a means of solving seemingly unsolvable problems — as well as the value of skills-based volunteering.
“You have changed the game,” said Alexander De La Campa, founder of A Future For Veterans — who, we should add, were voted by their fellow participants to have generated the most impactful operational solution, and were awarded a $5,000 donation from Tonkean.
“Hats off,” said Franco Mayoya of the Global Peace Foundation, “You guys brought light and inspiration in an otherwise dark 2020.”
Personally, we emerged from Changemakers ourselves emboldened and galvanized. We’ve been genuinely heartened to see the impact of investing in and empowering operations professionals. We believe operations to be the key to creating a better, more efficient, and more effective future of work for all professionals, from those working in the smallest nonprofits to the largest enterprises. Coming out of Changemakers, we’re more excited about our mission to equip and support ops professionals than ever before.
“Hats off,” said Franco Mayoya of the Global Peace Foundation, “You guys brought light and inspiration in an otherwise dark 2020.”
Looking ahead.
The impact we saw our nonprofit partners create for themselves through Changemakers is precisely the kind of impact we’re striving to make possible with Tonkean universally, and to see it come into such vivid fruition was definitely a highlight — and something we plan to continue for years to come.
That’s one reason why Changemakers was a fitting note to end the year on. This year has been tough for everyone. But what this year has also shown is there’s a real and urgent need for the solutions we’re building. Likewise, there’s real and possibly unstoppable momentum on the side of no-code, making technology that prioritizes and adapts to the needs of people and that empowers business operations.
The opportunity in front of us is to manifest a better future of work. We’ve never been more excited about answering that call.
If you want to learn more about what we’re doing to that end, check out tonkean.com.
