Case Study: Agillion

Launched to much fanfare, Agillion’s innovative customer relationship management service helps small to medium-sized businesses manage and communicate with their customers, engage in one-to-one marketing, and automate people transactions that build loyalty and fuel day-to-day operations. In other words, it’s online customer relationship management for B2B commerce.

Yet despite being inexpensive and easy to use, Agillion knew its new shared electronic resources would have to deal head-on with the issue of trust online. After all, much of its clients’ and their clients’ most mission-critical data would now exist on Agillion’s servers. As a fresh-faced start-up in the hyper-competitive Internet business services arena, Agillion understood that a significant part of its identity would hinge on the message it sent to the world about security issues. Mary Oliver, executive vice president of marketing and business development at Agillion, puts the security matter more poignantly: “It goes hand-in-hand with having a quality performing product. Without security, we don’t exist.”

Ditto with the issue of reliability. Says Oliver, “You don’t want to run your business on a system that might collapse, and then you’re not able to provide the service or get the product out the door.”

For Agillion, it was EY’s CyberProcess Certification that spoke volumes to their clients that they had done their homework on issues of security and availability. Now, says Troy Heindel, Agillion’s vice president of technical operations and CIO, when potential third party integration clients see the CyberProcess Certification attestation report and seal, “they know right away that we’ve reached a level of sophistication that meets their needs for partnerships.” And for Agillion and its clients, this is the sort of trust that’s contagious.