Nintex has an honest approach to digital transformation

This article was originally published in the Autumn 2019 issue of The Record. Subscribe for FREE here to get the next issues delivered directly to your inbox.

In March 2019, analyst group Forrester Research declared Nintex as an industry leader in digital process automation, saying, “Nintex leads the charge to make businesspeople into developers.” The firm has several qualities that give it its edge against stiff competition.

“Nintex’s first differentiator is completeness,” says Eric Johnson, CEO of Nintex. “No other company provides such a complete platform for automating processes across an enterprise. Numerous customers have automated tens of thousands of processes; one has automated more than 100,000. Where our competitors typically have one or two automation capabilities, we have the complete set, including process management, workflow automation, electronic forms, mobile application building, document generation, e-signature, robotic process automation (RPA), process analytics and optimisation. No one else has all that.”

While that could be enough to set it apart from competitors, Nintex has worked hard to ensure customers can use its powerful software easily.

“We’ve consistently been better than anyone else at allowing enterprises to automate a broad range of processes very quickly, through a drag-and-drop interface and without writing code,” says Johnson. “People work with us to automate both simple and sophisticated processes in hours or days – not the month-long timelines typical of other approaches.”

And the company’s priorities are paying off.

“The market clearly sees the value in our combination of completeness and ease of use,” Johnson adds. “We’re at least twice as big as our nearest competitor and our net promoter score (which indicates customer loyalty) is over 70, which we’re very proud of.”

Nintex runs on a core mantra of “run the business better”. Through its platform and range of capabilities, it aims to help people in every function and industry improve their efficiency and effectiveness.

“The reason we call people ‘knowledge workers’ is that they have specific expertise,” Johnson explains. “But so many processes are still managed today in the same way they were managed decades ago. They’re still highly manual, repetitive and prone to error, so people spend only a portion of their time applying their unique expertise. Process management and automation free people up to bring more value, expertise and creativity to the challenges facing their organisations.”

But while business leaders are often highly aware of the potential of these concepts in digital transformation, there is a lot of confusion about what solutions to use, and where to use them. According to Johnson, digital transformation often doesn’t deliver on its promise as a result.

“At Nintex we’re very clear about what we’re good at,” he says. “We don’t over-represent our role in digital transformation. We focus on process management and automation, and helping operations professionals to understand their processes and take a platform approach to automation. Some things might be better handled by someone else, and that is okay. That’s why Nintex is an honest broker.”

The firm’s success and honest approach to work has only strengthened its relationship with Microsoft. In the beginning Microsoft was central to Nintex’s vision, but now – over a decade later – both companies have grown and are laser-focused on the transformative power of cloud computing, a key enabler for their solid relationship.

“Microsoft’s investments in Azure, and in key applications like Office 365, Teams and Dynamics, have helped power our business as well as theirs,” says Johnson. “Microsoft recently named us as their top co-sell US partner in terms of transaction volume and we have excellent relationships with people at all levels within the company.”

Johnson also feels strongly about how Nintex cares for its workforce, as well as its customers.

“I feel a responsibility, first and foremost, to our employees and their spouses, significant others, and children,” Johnson explains. “As CEO, I’m the steward of Nintex’s continuing success, and what goes through my mind constantly is the responsibility to ensure that everyone we touch – employees, customers, partners, shareholders – has a great experience.”

“It’s also my responsibility to continue to build on the achievements of Nintex’s previous CEOs. We have a tremendous opportunity to enhance our capabilities and strategic relationships. Our engineering teams have been doing fantastic work in products such as Nintex Workflow for Office 365 and Nintex Forms, keeping us at the cutting edge.”

While he is aware of and prides the company on its success, complacency is not a trait with which the CEO can be attributed.

 “We’ve achieved strong growth every year since our inception,” he says. “We currently have over 8,000 customers but we see another 100,000 that need our help, and we’re focused on reaching them.

“Over the next 12 months we’ll continue to invest in innovation across our platform and in integration that enhances how each capability supports the others. In every company I meet, whether customer or prospect, it’s clear that none of them fully understand their processes, and all continue to wrestle with processes that are overly complex, manual, error prone. We can solve those problems. We want to scale up so we can reach even more organisations.”