OREANDA-NEWS. June 29, 2016. Solar energy has been a tantalizing alternative to fossil fuels for generations, but high costs (or the perception of high costs) has kept adoption out of the mainstream. Remember that one neighbor with the solar panels on the roof in the eighties? Didn’t you wonder what the deal with that guy was? What did he know that we didn’t? Solar users seemed like an exclusive club for a long time, but that is finally changing. That change is embodied by Direct Energy Solar, a provider installing solar systems on rooftops across the country. CIO Stephen Simons says the company has embraced technology that lowers costs and connects the company’s employees out in the field with its customers’ specific energy needs.

In this episode of IT Visionaries, we talk to Simons about how he used Salesforce to scale IT as the company grew from a start-up to being part of a major multi-national, the challenges the energy market faces now, and how to make solar affordable for everyone.

1) What are the challenges to solar and the energy market these days?

It's kind of funny because solar sprang out of Silicon Valley, so you'd think that the software around it would be a big part of the story. But in the solar space, many companies sought competitive advantage by doing software development themselves and so the evolution of third-party industry standard solutions has been relatively slow. Some are better, some are worse, but as an industry, we compete with software. There are opportunities to use technology more effectively than we do today in order to better serve our customers and employees and we continually seek to improve our operational efficiency and customer experience with the use of everything that Salesforce has to offer.

2) Tell me about how you use Salesforce.

Our mission is to make a difference in people's lives by harnessing our energy expertise. We’ve got a full fleet of companies, from heating and air conditioning, plumbing and electrical services, retail energy and gas, to solar. As a start-up solar business in 2010, we were using Excel and paper like everyone else. I was brought on board to build the platform that would give our company efficiency, scalability, stability, and a sustainable competitive advantage. We built our entire business — front office, back office, and everything in between — on the Salesforce platform. I used Sales Cloud and Service Cloud for sales and customer service. We built our own native applications on Salesforce for our operations teams. We also used App Cloud, which obviously comes with a lot of fully integrated tools right out of the box, to do our back end.

When we paired up with Salesforce, we gained a single platform on which we could build everything, a single integrated view of the truth across the entire customer lifecycle. Whether it's prospecting, lead generation, sales, compliance, operations, accounting, or customer care, wherever you need to access the customer record, you're using the same information that everybody else across the business is using. Solar is a remarkably high-growth, low-overhead, geographically diverse industry. Salesforce is key in giving us the flexibility to move in and out of local markets easily.

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3) How does Salesforce help you compete in new markets?

I used to say that the great thing about having built my entire business on Salesforce is that I can open up a new office with just a firewall router and an internet connection. Over 50 percent of our folks are in the field. They need to be able to work from their phones, their laptops, their tablets, with whatever internet connection they can get. App Cloud gives us that accessibility.

In a high-growth business, you think about how best to deploy your capital for infrastructure, and how best to scale the operation. That can be a real stress on a cash-strapped startup. With Salesforce, though, the cost scaled linearly with the business so we didn't have to pay for anything until we were using it. It was secure, stable, and scalable. When we added 100 employees, I could just call up Salesforce and say I had 100 new employees. The next day, I had 100 more licenses, and away we went. I never had to worry about whether or not our infrastructure could handle it.  When I came on board, there were around 30 employees. Now we're over 700.

4) How has Salesforce affected your app development process?

When we're selling solar in the home, we make it straightforward and easy. But being a solar installer is like a duck on the water: It looks smooth on the surface, but the feet are going a mile a minute underneath. A tremendous amount of work goes into getting a solar system installed — filing with the proper agencies, getting approvals — a complex process that all solar companies face. In this complexity, we saw an opportunity for a competitive advantage, and we used Salesforce to build a tool that simplifies the experience for our customers. It’s fully native, and we’ve been using it since 2012.

This tool has enabled our project managers to be far more productive. Previously, they could handle 5-10 concurrent projects; today, it’s more than 25. That’s a win not just for our project managers, but also for our customer experience.

There are a lot of low-code environments out there that have tried to create platforms similar to Salesforce, but nobody's been as successful. With Salesforce, you get faster development timelines, more stable and secure applications out of the box, and an environment where your developers can focus on the business logic that's unique to the solutions required. Where else but Salesforce would you launch a working prototype of a business-critical app into production for your business to use? You wouldn't. You just couldn't do that anywhere else.

With Salesforce, you get this ability to easily evolve and rapidly prototype. The result is you’re getting critical tools into the hands of business users, faster. With Salesforce, we are releasing new features and functionality every week or two, because we have this stable, secure, available platform supporting us.

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5) How do you encourage innovation at your company?

Innovation should be customer-driven, rather than top-down. Being plugged into your users in the field, understanding what they're facing every day, what it's like to be installing on a roof: this is all essential information. Technology should connect the business user’s needs with the customer’s needs.

One of the things that sets Salesforce apart is that Salesforce thinks about technology from a different perspective: with a person at the center of it. We realized that at the end of every single phone line, every single computer, every single mobile device, there is a human, and that's ultimately who we're serving.

6) How is technology helping to push solar energy adoption?

In the early days of solar, you had a lot of people adopting it only because they wanted to be environmentally friendly. And if there was a financial benefit, that was nice. But now we’ve driven the cost down and really made it available to the mainstream. You now hear folks say, “Solar is a good idea because I’m going to save on my monthly spending. It’s a win-win because I get to have the satisfaction of being financial prudent and making a difference for the environment.”

I think solar is also leading the way into the connected home. I think that we're just at the beginning of a revolution around the change in behavior that we can get out of solar. From a sustainability standpoint, improvements in storage and the ability to better understand our home power usage will make energy independence a possibility.

7) What role does IT have in facilitating these changes?

With everything from the connected home to the Internet of Things to the smart grid, technology is already at the very heart of our energy future. Obviously, we want to get the best tools in the hands of our people. We want a market to keep us competitive. We want tools that are cost-effective, that lower our total cost of ownership, and that make our lives easier. And at the end of the day, we have to ensure we’re building for the best interests of our customers and our shareholders.