As is often the case, you stumble upon great ideas not because you were smart, or you really knew that it was a great idea, but because it just happened by chance. This is what we call serendipity. Hire2Retire was created the same way.
In the summer of 2015 while I was in San Antonio at a conference, I got a call from the CTO of Topgolf. Later that afternoon we huddled on a conference call with him and his director of IT Operations. At that point in time Topgolf had about 15 locations nationwide with around 13,000 employees. The Topgolf CTO told me they could not hire an army of sysadmins to create AD accounts and emails for their employees and support the growth they were experiencing. Today, Topgolf has 70+ locations with more than 36,000 employees. This was a big problem for them and for any large company. Like others in the hospitality industry, Topgolf hires people who are seasonal workers – working during summers or holidays or are between life and career stages – the typical profile of waiters, waitresses, bartenders and other workers in the hospitality and entertainment industries.
The solution that we created for Topgolf in 2015 to integrate ADP HRIS to Active Directory (AD) in order to manage employee onboarding, offboarding and change of profiles had a direct annual cost avoidance of $750,000 or more as Topgolf continued to grow.
Over next couple of years many of our enterprise customers using our Hybrid Integration Platform (HIP) had similar needs, and we sold this solution to them as a software development service on our integration platform. We started to realize that we had stumbled upon a systematic problem across multiple industries and with a highly scalable magnitude of impact. Almost anyone who hires employees follows a similar process: HR creates a ticket or sends an email to helpdesk and then sysadmins create the employee AD account and email. This is a costly activity performed by highly skilled and qualified resources who could spend their time in more meaningful ways. Sysadmins literally hate to do this menial task!
Fast forward to 2018. We found ourselves in a situation where we were struggling to differentiate ourselves in a very crowded iPaaS industry. Almost everyone in the industry was trying to capture the market by saying how they have hundreds and thousands of connectors but there was really no significant business value differentiation across the industry. We took the bet on Hire2Retire and we started to sell our solution as a product after enhancing and adding features to make it appealing across a wide range of leading Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS). Over the next couple years, we continued to innovate by adding complex capabilities in a simple intuitive no-code user experience (UX). It did the magic, almost every customer was happy, and we started to have 400% year-over-year growth in new customer acquisitions over the last 3 years, just on this single product. We literally hit the jackpot on the product market fit.
We also realized the weakness in the iPaaS industry where products work for simple easy integrations that are focused on end user productivity but fail to provide value when it comes to complex business process automation. The business process automations need advanced domain specific algorithms and business logic along with the core capabilities of a middleware. And that’s really what Hire2Retire is as it packages the breath and the depth of functionality for a single business process of employee lifecycle and identity provisioning.
Over the last couple years, we have invested heavily in Hire2Retire, with it having a full self-service intuitive UX for customers to define their workflows using pre-built capabilities, functions and business logic to integrate more than 12 leading HR systems with AD, Azure AD and other identity systems. When I look back, I can certainly see we would never have been able to build this product had we not solved this problem for Topgolf in the summer of 2015!
Bramh Gupta is the founder and CEO of RoboMQ. He has a background in large scale real-time manufacturing systems, telecommunications and design and architecture of highly scalable and resilient enterprise systems. He is passionate about real-time integration and the value that it brings to business operations and critical decision making. Bramh holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Business and Industrial Engineering degree from the National Institute of Technology, Jamshedpur. Bramh combines his business insights and architectural skills to design and create highly scalable, integration platforms and tools that are needed to power the API economy.
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