Today, I’m extremely excited to announce that the “Big 3” analyst firms, Gartner,  Forrester, and IDC are all now officially covering digital adoption platforms (DAP) as its own category. In the latest publication, 2022 Gartner® Market Guide for Digital Adoption Platforms,* 14 out of the 40+ vendors in the DAP space today are recognized as Representative Vendors.

The report also estimates, ”By 2025, 70% of organizations will use digital adoption platforms across the entire tech stack to overcome insufficient application user experiences.”

We are truly at the tipping point for DAP.

This analyst coverage is just the latest evidence of what we and the brave early adopters that trusted us to solve their biggest technology adoption problems have known for years. 

User experiences matter for employees just as much as they matter for customers. Legacy approaches to driving technology adoption don’t work in the fragmented application landscapes that our employees live with every day. They expect more. They deserve more. And you’ll never realize the full potential of your technology investments without a new approach; without a digital adoption platform at your side. 

Coverage commitment by the largest analyst firms is monumental for the DAP space. It validates the courage of these early adopters, and gives the next wave of customers the confidence that DAP should be the standard for enterprise-wide technology deployments. And as the DAP market continues to expand, we will see more evaluative reports, such as the recent PEAK Matrix by Everest Group in which WalkMe was named the leading digital adoption platform for the third consecutive year.

Eleven years ago, we identified a challenge, took a concept we believed in, created a product, and told stories. Thousands of stories, to anyone who would listen. This was the critical education required as a category creator. And it has proven to be a critical part of becoming the market leader. 

Those countless conversations with prospects, partners, investors, customers, and industry analysts fed our innovation engine, allowing us to fine tune the value that WalkMe delivers to tens of millions of end-users every day via the industry’s first digital adoption platform, built to meet the scalability and sophistication demands of the enterprise. Today with users in more than 160 countries, WalkMe is trusted by 2,000 customers, including 80% of the Fortune 10. 

From time-to-proficiency (reduction in training and onboarding time), increased productivity hours and reduction in support calls, to improved NPS/user satisfaction scores, WalkMe is a strategic investment for today’s most forward-thinking organizations (see 50+ examples).

And it’s not just me – or WalkMe as a company – who thinks this; many of our customers have received accolades and industry recognition for their digital adoption programs’ impact on their organization (see Nestle, CHRISTUS Health, Colgate-Palmolive, ADP, Red Hat, AMN Health Services, WMG, GQR, and Sun Life).

With the publication of the latest Gartner Market Guide, we believe the DAP market is in the next phase of category creation: evolution. DAP’s potential is being realized within more and more organizations each day as we continue to work with leading enterprises to maximize the value in their technology investments.

With WalkMe as the engine leading the DAP revolution, the momentum is real. And there’s still a lot of room to get on this fast-moving train. 

Join us. 

*Gartner, Market Guide for Digital Adoption Platforms, Melissa Hilbert, Maria Marino, Stephen Emmott, 14 September 2022.

Disclaimer

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or is affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. 

With my very own Reservoir Dogs-style entrance, I get nostalgic, talking about how WalkMe launched 10 years ago with a mission to make the internet easy to navigate and make every user experience effortless. 

From baby steps to a global phenomenon 

It was exciting for me to reminisce about where we started out over a decade ago, and even to recall our very first slogan (“Walk the Web, step by step”), and the path taken to get to where we are today, the first and industry leading Digital Adoption Platform (DAP).

There are over 3,500 DAP professionals worldwide changing the way their companies are working and solving multi-million dollar problems by creating digital experiences that make a real difference.

TransFORM your enterprise workflows

Now, with WalkMe Enterprise (ta-da!), we’ll be pushing for more out-of-the-box pre-built solutions, on both the content and the data side, as more developers transition to codeless and local platforms for their organizations.

What do I mean by that? Well, we’ve been heavily investing in AI technology that recognizes UI, to help our customers analyze processes and build simplified, automated software experiences tailored to their needs. 

That’s great news for any company looking to make sense of the ever changing global work environment, with its varied user interfaces and programming languages, and easily adapt to changes. 

Not going to say Big in Japan, but…

It’s been a big year for us! We’ve been growing and expanding our footing across Europe, Japan, Singapore, and Australia. Just take a look at our employees from across the globe!

It’s all about our customers.

As WalkMe’s customer base grows, we encourage our customer community to work with us to build the future of data. We want to learn from you, get your input, and help you drive digital adoption to the best of our abilities. 

Hear more from WalkMe executives as they share their perspectives on the state of digital adoption and introduce exciting new products and services that will transform the digital outcomes enterprises can achieve on the market-leading WalkMe platform.

We are thrilled to announce that the WalkMe Digital Adoption Platform won an InfoWorld 2022 Technology of the Year Award. This tremendous honor comes right after we won Business Intelligence Group’s 2022 Artificial Intelligence Excellence Award for our UI Intelligence product.

This prestigious recognition coupled with the clear momentum in the digital adoption space feels like an arrival moment for WalkMe on the world stage.

While 2022 is certainly looking like a watershed year for the Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) category WalkMe created, the momentum has been building for just over a decade. And now we celebrate our incredible journey as a company. 

April 2022 marks the 10 year anniversary of when WalkMe introduced the industry’s first Digital Adoption Platform to the market. What got its start as a “nice to have” evolved to a “got to have it,” thanks to the continued investment in digital transformation projects and the ROI derived from increased digital adoption.

More than 13 patents, 2,000+ customers, a global pandemic and an initial public offering later, we are finally seeing digital adoption as a line item carved out within budgets for digital transformation projects. We are seeing critical mass for DAP. 

Over the past few years alone, there has been a significant uptick in DAP category coverage within the industry analyst community. As of Q1 2022, leading analyst firms including Gartner, Forrester and IDC all officially covered DAP as a category with at least one dedicated analyst. 

And in January 2022, IDC published its first dedicated report on Digital Adoption Platforms (IDC TechBrief, Amy Loomis and Marci Maddox), and we expect to see evaluative reports from Forrester and Gartner later in 2022-2023 (Forrester NewTech, Forrester New Wave, and Gartner Magic Quadrant).

The importance of successful digital adoption technologies

In an era when digital transformation reigns supreme, technology adoption is the gatekeeper to those projects’ success. Over time, enterprises have come to realize that their digital projects are at risk if they can’t better embed those technologies into their businesses. It’s as simple as that. 

Undoubtedly, digital adoption’s role in successful digital transformation projects was a foregone conclusion when the first DAP was launched a decade ago. Yet the tipping point–and critical mass–is upon us now. Why? 

One big reason is that technology adoption has traditionally gone unmeasured. This is because management’s attention has not been where the value is achieved. For example, management is very involved before a new system goes live; they are very focused on identifying the business needs, the development strategy, and deployment.

However, it’s only once the new system goes live that value will actually be realized. Yet, by go-live, management’s attention is already focused on the next digital project, often leaving the new system without the dedicated resources it requires to realize its full potential and bring home the best possible ROI.

It’s like a farmer who continuously plants crops but does not go back to tend to them because they are busy planting the next one.

The rising demand for Digital Adoption Professionals

Yet companies that broadly embrace DAP across their tech stack do not need to work on individual business outcomes. They can focus on many business outcomes at once from shortening customer ticket handling time to ensuring CRM data quality by following our four step process:

1. Evaluate systems to discover actual adoption metrics.
2. Identify areas of improvement using WalkMe’s insights.
3. Define success for your organization and deploy solutions, the result is a better user experience with in-app guidance and automation.
4. Continue to measure and optimize to ensure success into the future.  

Over time, it became more and more clear that enterprises need a dedicated person or team to focus on the critical moment of when digital projects go live — and beyond.

What is the ROI? How can it be measured? This can be a digital adoption professional who works exclusively on the successful adoption of technology within an organization.

And their tool of the trade is a robust digital adoption platform, which provides immediate insights to create and deliver elegant experiences for users to access the full functionality and value of applications, ultimately fulfilling the promise of digital transformation. 

The successful creation of the DAP market category has given rise to an entirely new profession – Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) Professionals.

There has been a 30% increase in LinkedIn profiles with this title, from 2,700 in March 2021 to 3,500 in March 2022. This model works. Individuals are recognizing it a career opportunity and enterprises are recognizing it a winning strategy for digital transformation success. 

With digital adoption being the missing link between the investment in technology and the value being realized, critical mass for DAP is here. And it’s growing steadily.

Hear more from our WalkMe executives as they share their perspectives on the state of digital adoption and introduce exciting new products and services that will transform the digital outcomes enterprises can achieve on the market-leading WalkMe platform.

With less than four months left in 2021, I can easily say it has been quite a year in terms of milestones for WalkMe—from growing our team to scale the business, to our IPO in June. And today, we add another milestone:

It’s my great pleasure to announce that Wayne McCulloch has joined WalkMe as our first Chief Customer Officer!

As we continue to evolve our platform to exceed the expectations of today’s data-first enterprises and create exceptional value along their journeys, it has become clear that we need the right leader to oversee customer success—one who also thoroughly understands that digital adoption is the most important piece of the digital transformation puzzle.

Wayne’s appointment will ensure the voice of our customers is represented at the highest level to maximize their experience throughout their WalkMe journeys. 

As Chief Customer Officer, Wayne will lead all post-sales functions, including Customer Success, Service, and Support. Wayne’s remit also includes the management and growth of WalkMe’s Digital Adoption Institute, with the mandate of advancing the profession of digital adoption through vocational certifications, executive education, and scholarships. 

Wayne is one of the world’s leading customer success experts, a startup advisor, investor, keynote speaker, best-selling author of the widely-acclaimed book, The Seven Pillars of Customer Success, and the recipient of multiple industry awards over his more than 25 years of experience in customer-focused roles in the B2B software space!

Through his leadership roles at Salesforce and most recently Google Cloud, where he led customer success of the entire SaaS portfolio of 7.1 million customers, Wayne has a unique understanding of what is needed to successfully scale a company’s customer-focused organizations (professional services, customer success, support, enablement, advocacy, community, etc).

Additionally, his expertise in extracting more value from the technology investments and user experiences of global enterprises made him a top pick for this role. 

Wayne joins us amid accelerated demand for digital adoption solutions and strong momentum behind our public debut this summer. And he is already making great strides within WalkMe! We are excited to have him on board and look forward to closing a strong fiscal year under his leadership.