The work management revolution has blossomed in tandem with its UC and collaboration equivalents, similarly turbocharged by the past half-decade's hybrid and remote working boom.
Project management, task management, portfolio management. Sales systems, IT projects, and marketing campaigns. All of it falls under the broad work management umbrella, and all of it has seen a competitive and wildly innovative market emerge to accommodate such demand.
Even the shrewdest and most innovative businesses need a compelling USP to stand out and thrive in this environment. What is Smartsheet's?
"Enterprise-grade scalability," Sarfraz Ali, Vice President and General Manager of EMEA at Smartsheet, told UC Today. "But those become important only if we can grow with the organisation."
Ali affirms that the nature of collaborative work management is that vendors often start with a small unit within a company and try to solve a specific problem. "Unless we can meet that department or team member where they're at, which is often a very narrow-scope use case, make them successful, and grow with them, it's very hard to support them," Ali elaborates.
"As we grow with them, it becomes important for us to be enterprise-grade. It's important for us to be scalable to billions of data units, for example. But it's a combination of meeting a user in that initial use case and growing with them to become enterprise-grade."
Smartsheet's Innovative Approaches to Scalability and Digital Transformation
Ali has been with Smartsheet for nearly 11 years, witnessing its evolution from a 100-person startup to a global leader in work management. Starting as a Product Manager, he later joined Smartsheet’s London expansion in 2018. With 25 years in tech, his expertise spans product management, engineering, consulting, and go-to-market strategy.
While Ali highlights scalability as Smartsheet's major market differentiator, the platform is also AI-powered and geared around driving projects, portfolios and programmes that instrument change in organisations across 13.5 million users in 190 countries worldwide.
"If you look at our current economic and geopolitical environment, you see a lot of really positive, disruptive innovation," Ali said. "So when customers come to us, they're really trying to figure out how to transform and change rapidly. Typically, that transformation comes down to a few key projects, programmes, and portfolios, which, if executed well, will truly define their trajectories in the market."
"As an example, I'll quote Sodexo," Ali continued. "They're one of our biggest customers in EMEA. They are a food and facilities management company operating in 53 countries via 23,000 sites. So, it's a pretty big enterprise-grade scalable operation with about 400,000+ employees."
What they're really using Smartsheet for is taking 15 global transformation initiatives and delivering them to the sites via projects, programmes, and processes. We've enabled the employees on their sites to drive work and execute their core workloads. But as a result, a lot of the data created in those sites starts surfacing across the different levels of the company, enabling reporting and understanding of how those transformation initiatives are landing."
Sodexo also embodies what Ali calls the "end state" of a company's Smartsheet journey in scalability: "They started with us in a certain use case, but they've seen enough confidence in us to grow the platform and the use case. Now they're involved in those 15 global transformation initiatives on the platform."
AI and Automation are Transforming Work Management
Just like in UC and collaboration, AI and automation are changing the game in work management—is Smartsheet also exploring these technologies' potential?
"That idea of adaptability, scalability, flexibility, and configuration is core to our support of our customers at scale," Ali said. "What I think AI has is that turbocharge effect. So, our ability to support those users and enable them to have a conversation with Smartsheet becomes incrementally or substantially more."
"We're really taking the concept of AI and going more from, 'It's not just about taking a paragraph, summarising it, or taking a document, creating a title,' to saying, 'Here is an AI agent that can almost serve on my behalf and potentially be a proxy, can make decisions on my behalf.'"
At last year's Smartsheet Summits, which took place in London and Seattle, the company launched the initial capabilities to propel that vision, with one of the most eye-catching being a formula builder.
"Formulas are often central to driving workflows," Ali added. "They are the central capability that decides the routing of logic and the decision-making in workflows. Often, formulas take time for users to build. There's a pretty high threshold in users understanding that and, as a result, building them into the system."
