At Dreamforce 2024, Enterprise Times caught up with Colin Johnson, Co-Founder and CEO of Aprika, the firm behind Mission Control. Johnson describes Mission Control as a “professional services automation built natively on the Salesforce platform, so it helps companies with all aspects of project management. Resource management, task allocation, scheduling, time sheets, Project financials, end-to-end processes built on the platform.”
Mission Control is strongest when targeting customers who already use Salesforce. Johnson now has a clear vision of where he wants Mission Control to go, “Ultimately, we want to be the product of choice for project management for anyone that’s using Salesforce.”
Last year, success against that vision was recognized with Salesforce naming it Salesforce 2023 Customer Success ISV Partner of the Year for the APAC region.
How does Mission Control differentiate itself from other competitors?
“It will depend on which competitor. Customer success is a huge factor. We have an amazing approach to supporting our customers. But it’s the fact that we work out of the box. Being bootstrapped, we’ve always focused on building the product to work out of the box.
“We don’t need a huge implementation. There’s not a big setup cost. With most of our competitors, you’re looking at a six to nine-month implementation period with 50 grand plus costs. Whereas with Mission Control, you can actually install and be up and running in a matter of minutes!”
Johnson revealed that the company mainly competes against Certinia, Klient, Cloud Coach and Kantata. The firm has 70% of its team based in North America and the rest in Australia, where Johnson is based. It means that the firm is also able to offer follow the sun support for most customers worldwide.
On the future
You mentioned that Aprika is bootstrapped. Are you still firm on your conviction to remain bootstrapped and not take any funding? Is that still the case?
“We are going to remain bootstrapped. With the downturn in the industry, for the same reasons that we stayed bootstrapped, we’ve been able to remain in control of our own destiny, and we do not have to answer to shareholders. We’re ultimately able to focus on the long-term benefit of the company and the team.”
Looking forward, I asked Johnson what his objectives are for 2025. He answered,
“It’s really just going to be business as usual for us, really. We’re looking to continue to expand our footprint in all of our core industries and continue to develop the product. So, we’ve always got a very proactive roadmap ahead of us. We’ve got a number of exciting things coming up on the roadmap in the next few releases.”
On Agentforce
The main news from Dreamforce was around Agentforce, the new Agentic AI solution from Salesforce. Johnson revealed that Mission Control has just got their hands on Agentforce, and he has several ideas for its implementation across the platform. He believes that Agentforce can assist project managers with several tasks. One notable one is the project status report; Johnson explained,
“A lot of customers are manually writing a summary of what’s been going on in the project for their customers to be included in that status report. We’re looking to introduce a feature that can generate that summary through AI.
“If you’re a project manager, you could be managing 10-15 projects, and you’ve got to manually analyze everything that’s been going on the project. We see that as a huge productivity boost for customers.
“Then we’ve got a new feature coming out in December, which allows you to generate a weekly health check of what’s going on with your project across a variety of parameters. We’ll be looking to automate the generation of those summary records as well.”
Johnson believes that once Agentforce is fully available for partners later in the year, they will introduce an extension package, probably in 2025.
On the broader topic of Agentic AI, how will it impact jobs?
“I’ve been talking about that internally a bit recently. I don’t necessarily think every single company is going to leverage AI. I should imagine that CFOs are probably going to get fairly cautious of it, given it’s transactional.
“As an example, your team’s been having a conversation about something, let’s say, in Slack. Then you’ve got three or four people that need to get up to speed on that. Do you really want to be paying for AI to generate a summary for each one of those people versus them reading the 20 posts? I think it’s got a place. There’s some places that will probably still be left to the human, from a cost perspective.”
The book question
What was the last book you read?
“Leaders Eat Last, by Simon Sinek. (Amazon Aus, UK, US).”
What was your main takeaway from it?
“Just making sure I’m looking after my team, really. I definitely do see that my team are important, probably one of the biggest assets of the company. It’s their attitude that helps us deliver an amazing product, deliver an amazing customer support experience. So just making sure I’m providing them with what they need.”
