The Digital Adoption Category Creator Surpasses $160 million in ARR and Forecasts the Future of the Market
WalkMe, the digital adoption leader and one of the fastest growing software companies globally, today celebrates significant milestones—including its fifth consecutive year on the Forbes Cloud 100—and shares its perspective on the digital transformation trends of 2020, drawing insights from across the global tech landscape.
WalkMe holds more than half of the global revenue share in the Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) market according to the Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) Products PEAK Matrix® Assessment with Technology Vendor Landscape 2020, conducted by Everest Group. The company continues to grow, with its annual recurring revenue (ARR) increasing to over $160m in 2020. A Total Economic Impact study conducted by Forrester consulting revealed that enterprise organizations using WalkMe obtained a three-year return on investment of 368%.
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WalkMe’s proprietary data provides unique insight into the market movements of the past year, which saw the CIO’s office take on an increased role in delivering software ROI and ensuring business continuity. CIOs also assumed greater responsibility for safeguarding the mental health and productivity of the workforce and further converged with HR to drive onboarding and training in a distributed workforce.
“Technology impacts the wellbeing of an organization and this was felt acutely in 2020” says Rafael Sweary, President and Co-Founder of WalkMe, adding, “CIOs relied on having robust, data-driven insights into employee engagement in order to ensure business as usual. With WalkMe’s Digital Adoption Platform CIOs were able to overcome new obstacles and execute digital transformation at speed and scale.”
CIOs Turn to Digital Adoption Platforms to Carve Order from Chaos
CIOs had feared that the knee-jerk response to the pandemic would result in IT budget cuts—with many believing that such budget cuts would continue into 2021.
The opposite proved to be true. In November 2020, WalkMe collaborated on a survey of over 100 Fortune 500 CIOs with Constellation Research, digging into CIOs’ 2021 priorities. Surprisingly, according to the data, almost 60% reported no change to their budgets. This enabled them to invest in digital transformation, which 77% cited as their number one priority for 2021.
Global CIOs leveraged WalkMe Insights, a sophisticated analytics dashboard, to define and evaluate digital adoption goals. This enabled them to ensure all employees are utilizing technology at maximum efficiency to bolster management efforts. Thanks to increased transparency into application usage, WalkMe customers surveyed by Forrester Consulting saved 20% in software license fees. Interviewees reported that the increased transparency into the usage of applications allowed them to better ensure that enterprise applications were used to their full potential.
Customers Using WalkMe’s DAP to Support ERP Spikes as Operational Flexibility and Resilience Become Imperative
As cloud migration skyrocketed to facilitate the interdepartmental collaboration of a distributed workforce, global business had to sharply reevaluate the flexibility and functionality of their legacy Enterprise Resource Management (ERP) systems. In 2020 WalkMe saw a 50% increase in customers deploying a digital adoption strategy to support their ERP rollout. The benefits of digital adoption in helping users navigate complex workflows and processes quickly became clear to businesses struggling to implement operational agility.
In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, many enterprise organizations accelerated their cloud ERP deployments to address back office challenges and strengthen forecasting accuracy. Two-thirds of WalkMe for EPR deployments occurred between the months of July and September 2020, highlighting a reactive focus on resource allocation and forward planning in light of the disruption caused by COVID-19.
WalkMe believes this trend will continue as the need for distributed employees to access real-time metrics and reports will increase in step with the ubiquity of remote work. The need to migrate to cloud-native ERP is clear: back office architecture must be agile and interoperable to ensure operational and financial resilience.
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WalkMe Accelerates Its Product Roadmap to Address Communication Silos
The acceleration of communication technologies in response to COVID-19 caused a significant market boom, with Zoom reaching a public valuation high of over $48 billion. Simultaneously, adoption of Microsoft Teams skyrocketed, with 44 million active users by March 2020 jumping to 115 million in October 2020. Yet for the worker this fragmentation has become a mental and technological burden. As competing technologies fight to become the global communication platform of choice, silos have emerged at the expense of the user experience. Employees fail to access information in their moment of need.
In order to bridge the experience gap WalkMe invested developer resources into bringing its desktop product—Workstation—to market six months earlier than expected. Workstation acts as a personal assistant to ensure companies have everything they need in one place. Workstation was awarded the ‘Overall Remote Tech Solution of the Year’ for helping a US-based healthcare company upskill 80,000 doctors to use a new teleconsultation tool in one week.
Digital Adoption Proves to be a Critical Lever for Ensuring Business Continuity
Every business has a contingency plan—for malicious attacks, acts of nature, and other doomsday scenarios—but no one had planned for a global pandemic. Most businesses’ IT architecture was not optimized for such a shock wave. The resulting tumult highlighted the importance of having a digital adoption strategy baked into disaster preparedness plans.
In April of 2020 WalkMe partnered with a leading global system integrator to deliver impressive results in a contract tracing project across three U.S. states. By automating and streamlining a workflow which allowed investigators to jump to a section of script when on the phone with a patient, WalkMe immediately reduced support ticket volume by 50%—ensuring that comprehensive support was available throughout the contact tracing program. WalkMe also helped the same business onboard 2,650 Salesforce users, increasing productivity and data integrity through clarifying work processes and automation.
HR & IT Converge to Overcome the Remote Onboarding Challenge
Onboarding new employees remotely has been a technological challenge for HR departments. As the gap narrows between IT and HR, the two departments have found themselves working hand in hand. There has been a complete workflow readjustment, with the IT team taking on more responsibility for the smooth and seamless onboarding of the workforce.
WalkMe has been a key lever for organizations onboarding their employees remotely. A recent Total Economic Impact study conducted by Forrester Consulting, revealed that companies who deploy WalkMe saved on average 50% in onboarding time and 60% in training time on applications as well as significant time on classroom training.
Likewise, in 2020 WalkMe’s employee count grew to over 850 employees operating across 10 countries—with most being onboarded remotely. In March 2020, WalkMe welcomed Andrew Casey, a core member of the executive leadership team and tenured tech finance professional with 29 years’ experience, as CFO, to operationalize and streamline the business. In May 2020, WalkMe welcomed Uzi Dvir as Global CIO, to ensure the smooth deployment of WalkMe’s own technical architecture as the business rapidly expands to serve its 2,000+ customers across the globe.
Digital Adoption Professionals Become a Highly Sought-After Job Category in a Rapidly Changing Market
The World Economic Forum identified the need for a reskilling revolution as the Fourth Industrial Revolution has disrupted traditional industries and left many millions of people unequipped with the skills needed to thrive in the digital future. To help tackle this challenge, WalkMe launched its Digital Adoption Institute in August 2020 and extended scholarships for those on furlough or unemployed, ensuring this high-demand professional development was universally accessible. The company also launched its Digital Adoption job board in November 2020. Since its inception global companies such as Deloitte, Red Hat and IBM have posted vacancies, cementing the Digital Adoption Professional as an emerging class of enterprise employee.
“There has been an increase in the demand for DAP professionals across key industry segments, such as consulting, telecommunications, and business intelligence,” says Rafael Sweary, President and Co-Founder of WalkMe “with Gartner predicting that by 2025 over 70% of organizations will use Digital Adoption technologies, we expect to see these numbers rise over the next year as multiple industries will employ DAP professionals to streamline change management and improve ROI.”
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