Welcome to the New BetterCloud

Today’s an important day at BetterCloud—the beginning of a new chapter in the company’s history. Several changes went into effect earlier today that impact everything from the names of our products to the platforms we support.

These changes fall into three main categories:

New Name, New Look, New Brand

As you may already have noticed, we unveiled a new logo and website this morning. We’re also retiring the name “FlashPanel”—going forward, it’ll be known as BetterCloud for Google Apps.

If you’ve gone through a rebranding before, you know how much thought goes into things like taglines, logos, and website layouts. Those things do matter, and they took a long time for us to put together, but in the end they’re just an outward expression of a deeper change. The new brand is driven by the maturation of our company over the last three years. Since our founding we’ve learned a lot about who we are and who our customers are, and we’re using that learning to set the tone for the next chapter of our history.

Some of that has to do with making public things we’ve long been practicing internally. On our new site, we’re now making our BetterCloud Customer Promise® public. We’re stating who we are as a company and what it means to work here. And we’re telling our customers’ stories in a way that gets to the heart of the problems we live to solve.

BetterCloud for Office 365

You may have wondered why FlashPanel’s new name is “BetterCloud for Google Apps,” instead of just “BetterCloud.” The reason is that our flagship product has a new sibling: BetterCloud for Office 365.

For years, we’ve been keeping an eye on the Office 365 ecosystem. When Satya Nadella took over as CEO, and it became clear that Microsoft was taking their cloud office offering just as seriously as Google was, we decided it was time to bring our expertise and passion to that market. In our interviews with customers we learned that IT admins on Office 365 have similar needs, but the specific functionality they require is a little different. That means we’re building alerts, monitoring, and automated management tools that work in concert with Azure Active Directory and the other components of the Office 365 suite.

At this moment, BetterCloud for Office 365 is free, in beta, installed on dozens of Office 365 tenants and ready for more customers to start testing it out. We plan to take an approach similar to the one that worked so well with our Google Apps product: The software will remain free while we continue to learn our customers’ needs and enhance the application’s functionality.

In keeping with our core values, we’ll be fully transparent with all beta customers throughout the process. We’ll let you know exactly which features may become a part of our eventual paid solution, so you don’t start depending on a feature you ultimately can’t afford to use. As we did with our Google Apps product, we’ll thank beta customers by giving them the opportunity to purchase the eventual paid solution at a significant discount.

New and Redesigned SKUs

Our Google Apps product got us to where we are today. Thousands of organizations are using BetterCloud Enterprise, and tens of thousands are using our free product. Across all of these organizations, BetterCloud is used to manage more than 32 million users and 2 billion documents.

BetterCloud started as a basic directory management tool. Now it covers reporting, monitoring, auditing, automation, and security. The product has evolved into a true enterprise-grade security and management suite, complete with powerful insights, automated workflows, and granular compliance policies that our customers use to run their entire cloud office environment.

For the last few months, we’ve been telling our customers about this change, and now the day is upon us: Today, we’ve broken up our Google product into three more clear and logical SKUs:

• BetterCloud Basic: A free product focused on monitoring, alerting, and insights.
• BetterCloud Pro: Builds on Basic with administration tools and workflows for every step of the user lifecycle.
• BetterCloud Enterprise: Offers auditing, compliance, and data loss prevention (DLP) policies, plus full-service admin and reporting tools.

When we founded BetterCloud in late 2011, our support team consisted of David Hardwick (our CTO) and me. By July 2012, we’d grown to 15 employees and added a knowledge base and ticketing system. Now—just three years later—we have a 14-person customer support team, a 98% satisfaction rating, and offer live chat in the application for BetterCloud Enterprise customers. The product, and the team supporting it, have clearly risen a notch or five since our inception. The new SKUs reflect that change.

I know these may be a lot of changes for our partners and our customers to digest. Ultimately, though, they’re the foundation for our future. Our goals for our product are bigger than ever. Our new tagline—”Powering Cloud IT”—is more than a slogan. We believe that IT administrators have better things to do than spending hours deprovisioning users, or policing email signatures, or reviewing document sharing settings. We believe that when IT admins spend their time using their real skills, they have the power to transform their organizations.