Airtable exec describes constructing a ‘information hub’ for the enterprise
Airtable is greater than only a ‘spreadsheet on steroids,’ says Ilan Frank, who not too long ago joined as head of platform after leaving Slack.
IDG
Airtable has been lauded for reinventing that mainstay of workplace productiveness software program, the spreadsheet. But there’s much more to the corporate’s low-code app than replicating spreadsheet capabilities within the cloud, in response to Ilan Frank, who not too long ago left Slack to be vp of product at Airtable.
Airtable combines the performance of a relational database with an intuitive interface that lets customers plan a workforce mission, handle a gross sales pipeline, and extra. Its low-code strategy allows a variety of customers to customise workflows to fulfill their particular wants.
The app is sometimes called being “like a spreadsheet on steroids,” stated Frank, although that description underplays its use for companies. “I do not take a look at that in that method in any respect.”
Ilan Frank
Ilan Frank, vp for product at Airtable.
What Airtable does, he stated, is tie collectively information from numerous apps that function methods of report for companies. This could possibly be information generated in Airtable itself or by exterior apps, equivalent to incidents logged in PagerDuty, tickets in Zendesk, or territory maps in Salesforce. “We’re building a data hub that unlocks all that siloed data.”
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One method that is executed is by way of Airtable’s information sync integrations, which can be utilized with Jira Cloud, Box, Tableau, and GitHub, amongst others. Airtable plans to extend the variety of syncs so customers can carry information into the platform and share it throughout their group. The firm additionally plans to create an API so builders can create their very own agent to sync with exterior methods, and work is beneath option to construct an information “marketplace” inside the app, Frank stated. That method, prospects can share data extra simply internally.
In one sense, he stated, Airtable’s “data hub” strategy has a parallel with Slack’s collaboration platform, which proved a well-liked conduit for interactions between co-workers. “Slack is implausible from an engagement perspective for folks to speak with each other,” he stated. “Everything is there, it’s an optimum answer. But I feel it is also essential in departments which might be unfold internationally for information to [be connected]. And that, I feel, is the place Airtable is available in.”
Airtable, which launched in 2013, has caught the eye of buyers in recent times. A $735 million funding spherical in December valued the corporate at $11 billion and introduced its whole funding to $1.4 billion. The firm claims greater than 300,000 prospects, together with Netflix, Red Bull, and luxurious items agency LVHM, and is utilized by round 80% of the Fortune 500. It’s annual recurring revenues are reportedly above $100 million, and CEO Howie Liu is considered making ready for a public itemizing within the subsequent couple of years.
The hiring of Frank is a sign of Airtable’s plan to focus on bigger enterprise prospects. During his six years at Slack, he spearheaded that agency’s push into the enterprise, and was concerned within the creation of Slack’s Enterprise Grid product, which aided deployments to 1000’s of staff. Near the top of his tenure at Slack, Frank labored for 9 months concurrently as a product advisor for Airtable earlier than leaping to the latter agency. He additionally advises a number of different firms on shifting from product-led progress to establishing a stronger enterprise presence.
He cited similarities between Airtable and Slack of their preliminary adoption amongst smaller groups inside a company earlier than spreading extra broadly. Airtable is more and more being adopted throughout buyer organizations, he stated, citing the “same signs of maturity…where Slack was starting to really be viewed as a wall-to-wall tool by the C-suite.
“It’s brought in by a team and spreads to other teams, then eventually IT or some type of central technology organization says, ‘Okay, now everyone has access to Airtable.’ So it’s a very similar go to market,” stated Frank.
This viral adoption, he stated, can be one of many differentiators Airtable has compared to different low-code or no-code enterprise apps. “We are continuing to live and breathe that DNA of product-led growth, of being very easy to use and adopt,” he stated.
“Unlike some enterprise platforms, we want to be brought in bottom-up and make sure we serve the needs of end users, as well as eventually the CIOs that will be adopting it and rolling it out wall-to-wall,” he stated. “It’s thinking about both the ‘user’ and the ‘chooser.’”
Airtable has been “hugely successful” at a workforce degree, stated Angela Ashenden, principal analyst at CCS Insight. That’s been especdially true in smaller organizations the place it faucets into rising demand for low-code choices that empower “individuals, non-technical employees to solve their own problems — which are often very specific to their organization or their team.”
Gaining floor amongst bigger firms represents one other problem.
“It checks the field for ground-up, viral adoption,” she stated. “But stepping as much as the enterprise alternative is at all times onerous, not least due to the brand new safety and compliance complexity that usually comes at this degree.
“Getting enterprise-wide buy-in, discovering the proper stakeholders and convincing IT organizations that that is one thing apart from shadow IT can even be a problem,” Ashenden stated. “There’s usually nonetheless a necessity for centralized management and administration, which jars with the distributed creation strategy.”
Ashenden notes a variety of opponents too, from smaller gamers like Coda and Asana, to the likes of Microsoft with its Lists product.
“So it would undoubtedly take time for Airtable to achieve severe traction and credibility within the enterprise,” she stated, “however the firm’s current injection of funding will little question play a vital position in fuelling this drive.”