Before 2020, working remotely was a novelty, but that didn’t stop Ed Rogers, CEO of Akumina, from building a vision for a better employee experience.
“Most companies were working with disconnected digital workplaces that didn’t look or feel like the company they were meant to represent,” said Rogers. “We saw an opportunity to create a platform that could be used for all employees and make their workday more enjoyable – from the CEO to the deskless worker, and everyone in between.”
It wasn’t long before Rogers and Akumina’s leadership understood that what they were building hadn’t yet been invented. When Akumina came to market, traditional intranets were a dying technology that many did not even understand. Akumina’s mission was to create an environment that went beyond the surface of those traditional intranets. “Folks would say ‘intranet’, but that word didn’t feel like it did justice to what we were trying to achieve,” Rogers stated. “Others tried ‘modern intranet’, ‘digital workplace’ or ’employee hub’, but the majority of people didn’t know what that meant.”
Additionally, hundreds of companies were flooding the competitive market with similar names and definitions for their products. Still, nothing really fit.
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“We knew we wanted employee experience to be at the center of what we were trying to do,” said Jason Arden, VP of Engineering at Akumina. “But beyond that, we struggled to figure out what to call it. It’s not easy to define something and build it at the same time.”
It wasn’t until 2018 when the team was in a strategic planning session that the term, “Employee Experience Platform” was coined. Suddenly, everything clicked.
“It was exactly what we were looking for,” said Rogers. “Finally, a term to describe the vision that we were trying to offer the market. We put it directly into use and haven’t looked back since.”
Fast-forward to 2022, and ‘Employee Experience Platform’ is a term used widely in the market, gaining traction with 3rd-party analysts like Gartner, Forrester and ClearBox Consulting. Akumina was just recognized as one of only six global software providers who appear in Gartner’s Market Guides for both Employee Communication Apps and Packaged Intranet Solutions.
ClearBox recently released their review of 20 of the industries’ top global vendors in their Buyers Guide to Employee Experience and Intranet Platforms Report. Akumina was recognized as the third highest platform in the report. The 716-page report takes a deep dive into the companies, their products, features for user experience, visual appeal, employee communication, and more.
“‘Employee Experience Platform’ has become the new baseline for what companies need to be successful in 2022,” said David Maffei, Akumina President and CRO. “It’s no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have for working world.”
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With remote and hybrid work becoming mainstream and all this momentum behind them, Akumina just concluded its best first quarter in company history. All the while adding global enterprises in manufacturing, life sciences, natural resources, and financial services to its diverse customer roster, including Los Angeles based, Causeway Capital Management.
Founded in 2001, Causeway Capital manages assets for institutions located in the United States, Canada, Australia, Europe, and the Middle East with $44 billion assets under management.
“When we started our project, it felt like we were building out a traditional intranet page which we were never truly satisfied with,” said Pete Petersen, CTO at Causeway Capital. “We wanted to take the friendly and helpful culture of our firm and embed it in an internal site. It wasn’t until our implementation team saw the Akumina out-of-the-box capabilities that we understood what an employee experience could be and what we needed to implement.”
“We initially tried to create an employee experience platform internally but were looking for a streamlined solution that allowed for a quick and efficient implementation,” continued Petersen. “We knew that we could meet most of our project goals with our Microsoft investment, but Akumina was the only partner that we talked to that knew how to properly leverage our technology investments. The power of the Akumina stack will mean that we deliver a world-class experience without overloading our technical resources. We finally feel like we have the ‘town square’ feel that we were looking for and that the initial spirit of the project will become reality.”
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