As 2023 draws to a close, it’s the perfect time to look back at what JMP has accomplished this year.
"I realize how much change we have experienced in the last several years, but all that work, adaptation, and growth have resulted in a business, a culture, and an infrastructure that will be the foundation for our future success. I am very proud of our organization, our people, and our product,” said John Sall.
Yes, in many ways, it’s been a year of great challenges, but it’s also been a year of great growth and progress. It’s easy to lose sight of how far we’ve come, especially when each day is so busy and there’s always another project to tackle, another deal to close, another system to install.
So take a minute (and take a breath) to appreciate what JMP has done in 2023 – what your colleagues, what your team, and what you have done in 2023. Because JMP is all of you, and nothing would have happened without your perseverance, your creativity, and your commitment.
Please note, this list is not in any particular order and is in no way complete.
Sales
- Team China demonstrated great resilience and industry insight by developing business successfully in white space industries, such as auto and battery.
- Team Korea launched its first in-person Discovery Summit in November. It was very well attended, signaling huge growth potential for JMP in the Korean market in 2024.
- EMEA teams executed myriad customer-facing activities, which resulted in impressive customer retention rates and more than 40% growth in renewal revenue in 2023.
- The Japan team drove impressive renewals growth, establishing a great foundation for further growth in 2024. One highlight was the Semiconductor team’s new ELA contract at Taiyo Yuden.
- The PacNW team worked with a strong champion at PCC Structurals to promote an analytics culture using JMP, which led to a 61-user JMP upgrade and a two-user JMP Pro Upgrade. The support from this champion has now sparked PCC Structurals’ interest in exploring additional JMP products for its expanding business.
- Despite a persistent Minitab foothold, multiple lay-offs, and a challenging renewal, the West Strategic High Tech team won a BIG upgrade at Tesla. This $94.7k upgrade took Tesla from 485 to 687 users, further weakening the Minitab anchor.
- At Archer Daniels Midland, JMP closed an 18-month sale effort resulting in a five-year deal – for up to 17,000 employees – in ADM’s Manufacturing and Research Departments, with Year 1 revenue of $596,000 and ramping up to $1,665,000 by Year 5.
User Enablement
- Successfully launched My JMP (my.jmp.com), which now delivers software and serves as the identity service for JMP User Community.
- Converted seven (soon to be eight) courses from JMP Education to on-demand versions in Learn JMP.
- Launched the JMP Engagement Team, which is now answering calls and emails as the primary contact point for JMP.
- Smoothly transitioned the JMP Store, resulting in few customer support inquiries.
- Planned and implemented very successful in-person user group meetings around the world.
Global Operations
- Successfully assumed restricted party screening and due diligence responsibilities.
- Began transitioning all January 2024 U.S. renewals greater than $10K to JMP Statistical Discovery LLC.
- Notified U.S. and Japanese customers with deals under $10K that they will be moved to the JMP Store for their January and February renewals.
- Implemented process to clean up the account and the contact information, giving JMP good, solid data to grow the business. JMP can now send customers the correct agreement to fit their current needs.
- Received first signed JMP UTOF for a 2024 renewal. Yay!
Human Resources
- Hired and welcomed 73 new full-time employees and 25 interns to JMP this year.
- Initiated a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Action Team that will complement the SAS DEI program. The team is already planning some initiatives for 2024 that will be communicated soon.
- Conducted an Employee Experience Survey to gauge employee sentiment about JMP. Results were generally very positive and will be shared in Q1. Strategies are being developed to address areas of opportunity.
- As a result of requests from some managers, developed and delivered refresher management training in the U.S. and Japan, with plans to expand to EMEA and broader AP in 2024.
- Provided timely, day-to-day support on an array of HR issues to nearly 500 global employees, as well as strategic HR support for many department leaders.
Digital Operations
- Established a fully integrated, JMP-specific quote-to-cash process utilizing multiple systems, including Salesforce CPQ, DocuSign CLM, NetSuite, Mulesoft, and Experience Cloud. Launching in late January, it has since expanded to six countries and has had more than $500K in opportunities flow through it YTD.
- Streamlined the JMP Store user experience while also transitioning it to run completely on JMP systems. The JMP Store has had more than $600K flow through it since it was switched over in August. It also now supports a more seamless Student Subscription process, with more than 800 downloads by students since it went live in early November. The JMP Store uses a variety of systems, including:
- Salesforce Identity for user authentication.
- Magento for the storefront experience.
- Salesforce for order management.
- NetSuite for invoicing and financial reporting.
- Built the My JMP portal using Salesforce Identity and Experience Cloud to allow customers to download purchased JMP software and related license files. My JMP was also used to deliver the JMP 18 and JMP Clinical 18 EA releases.
- Established Salesforce Service Cloud as the system of record for JMP Tech Support worldwide, including standing up capabilities for use by the newly established JMP Engagement Team (JET) and the support team in Japan.
Marketing
- Planned and implemented five in-person Discovery Summits in Spain, China, the U.S.,
Korea, and Japan. Each event successfully educated, connected, and entertained JMP users and statistical thought leaders. Virtual components corresponded with each event, allowing more users to participate.
- Launched an automated customer reference program that shines a spotlight on JMP users whose stories might otherwise go untold – all the while enabling salespeople to let satisfied users speak to prospects about their journeys with JMP products.
- Rewarded and acknowledged JMP’s 2022 top-performing salespeople with a trip to Ireland, the first post-pandemic Elite Sales Circle trip, which, according to many participants, was worth the wait.
- Provided greater visibility into how visitors interact with the website by setting up click tracking across www.jmp.com using Google Tag Manager; created reports to monitor interactions with all menu items and call-to-action buttons.
- Saw 20% growth year-over-year in paid activated trials for Tier One countries, despite 15% cut in the overall budget.
Legal
- Expanded the Legal team by adding attorneys and paralegals to increase the capacity, bandwidth, and ability for handling the move to JMP First systems and legacy contract transitions.
- Devised and implemented a strategy to migrate approximately 12,000 legacy customer agreements from SAS to JMP.
- Created the new JMP UTOF, new JMP Store License Agreement, and revised Student Subscription Agreement.
- In coordination with Global Operations and Digital Operations, implemented a restricted party screening process.
Finance
- Processed the first JMP First sales in Germany, DACH, and the U.S., crossing the $1 million threshold in November.
- Created new automated processes and policies from scratch for every area of Finance: invoicing, taxes, cash receipts, reporting to SAS, etc.
- Had successful month-end closes before, during, and after implementing NetClose.
- Finalized updated Varicent plan and contract for 2024 implementation.
- Successfully handed off of commissions/bonus accruals by using a more standard approach.
- Implemented a seamless process for U.S. e-commerce, beginning with Magento all the way to invoicing without manual intervention.
- Developed a Finance Confluence page and produced Finance 101 updates to provide greater transparency to colleagues.
Product Management
- Saw strong adoption of the Analytics Maturity Assessment, a strategic sales tool that has already helped several teams identify white space and drive upgrades.
- Delivered 19 training opportunities, with an average of 115 attendees per session.
- Rolled out the Sales Enablement Library in Confluence, a one-stop shop for sales enablement materials.
- Refined messaging around Engineering Efficiency, which will be a part of a larger rollout in Q1 2024.
- Conducted prototype and user testing on several core new JMP 18 features, leading to many improvements.
- Updated the English version of STIPS to JMP 17; surpassed 60,000 enrollments worldwide.
- Improved JMP telemetry data collection in JMP 18 to understand usage patterns and make better decisions about where to invest development resources.
- Moved the Early Adopter program to My JMP with named users; tested the new JMP authorization via the EA program.
- Developed the AI Assistant Add-in, a strong prototype for integrating AI/LLMs into JMP, which will pave the way for efforts to build a natural language interface to JMP in future versions.
- Developed and conducted JMP Roadmap sessions at Discovery Summits.
Development
- Developed multiple new features for JMP Live 18.0:
- Administrators can configure synchronization between a company’s active Directory server and JMP Live, making it easier to automatically adjust permissions.
- Folder-level permissions have been added, meaning if users need different levels of access to specific folders, permissions can be directly configured on those folders.
- Created new features rolling out in JMP 18.0:
- Embedded Python, with extended integration in JSL to easily transfer data between Python applications and JMP, making it significantly easier and more reliable to run Python applications as part of a JMP workflow.
- The introduction of data connectors, a flexible and extensible method to share connections to outside data sources between JMP users. Users publishing reports to JMP Live that are dependent on a data connector will now have a connection that continues to work for data refreshes within JMP Live.
- A simplified licensing process for JMP 18, making it easier to start up JMP and to administer licenses. An email-based authentication scheme reduces complexity and provides an interface that is more industry standard.
- Added the new Fatigue Model platform to the JMP suite of reliability data analysis. Recent research by a group of statisticians and engineers, which revolutionized the approach to analyzing the fatigue experiment data, resulted in software that will have a far-reaching impact to a wide range of industries and ordinary lives.
- Published multiple papers (one even snagging the Lloyd S. Nelson award for Caleb King), expanding the DOE group’s reputations as experts in the field.
- After listening to feedback from customers, added enhancements to EasyDOE, including support for loading designs from data tables and adding guided analysis support for prospective confidence intervals and heredity.
- Developed a methodology to create a usability study and an automated tool to make an unmoderated study for JMP development. The unmoderated usability studies have been integrated with the Early Adopter program, and four concurrent usability studies were conducted in the JMP Lab at the JMP Discovery Summit Americas. Currently, two new patents based on the usability study tool are being pursued.
- Received two new patents:
- Yeng Saanchi for Graphical User Interface for Power and Uncertainty Interval Constructions.
- Mark Bailey and Jacob Rhyne for Experiment Design Variants Evaluation Table.
- Made great strides in the transition to Service Cloud, including:
- Using a series of JSL scripts to modify the data coming out of Service Cloud and to create weekly reports that are shared in Development Updates, as well as on JMP Live.
- Adding an EA version field so that R&D can incorporate the customer’s EA version more easily into reports.
- Updating and improving auto-reply for beta feedback so that it contains beta-specific information rather than generic technical support information.
- Moved JMP’s Windows continuous integration builds, nightly unit tests, documentation, and help production processes (along with many other automated jobs from SAS-owned virtual machines) to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
- Released JMP Clinical 17.2, which replaces JMP Clinical 8 and eliminates the need to use SAS.
- Streamlined the JMP 18 build and installer production process with the new JMP authorization system, replacing other licensing mechanisms and reducing the number of unique builds and installers created.
- Tested the authorization mechanism in preparation for the JMP 18 release in March, led by teams in Cary and Beijing.
- Completed the bulk of JMP’s transition to Atlassian, with more staff adopting its tools.
- Completed the JMP 18.0 Help Menu Simplification project, including restructuring the JMP Help menu (removing PDFs from the menu, reorganizing the menu items, and simplifying the tooltips), moving the New Feature documentation online, and rebranding the Tips of the Day as the Quick Start.
- Created a localization dashboard to automate the creation of localization projects.
- Created neural machine translation (NMT) models that will be used to augment JMP’s translation resources and processes. These models can be a resource to other divisions in JMP since they produce more accurate translation output than off-the-shelf machine translation solutions. These translations are consistent with JMP’s terminology and require less posting-editing, thus improving the speed and quality of future translation projects.
- With input from developers across many platforms, developed Platform Presets in record time, building an impressive set of functionality for the first release of this important feature.
- Built a multiple-column formula editor for JMP 18 that will give users substantial new power in creating and editing large sets of formula columns and for tackling wide transformation challenges.
- Created innovative new functionality for the JMP Profiler, Overlaid Interactions, which can show the conditional response function for a variable across various levels of the factor space.
- Built a significantly functional prototype for a JMP Notebook, a much-asked-for feature similar to a Jupyter Notebook or Google Colab. (This feature will be released in JMP 19.)
- Created a new Sample Data Index with improved filtering and search capabilities to make it easy for users to find the sample items they need.
- Improved JMP Search, adding guided paths from search, as well as search capabilities for red triangle menus.
- Built Header Statistics for the JMP data table, which will allow users to see the summary statistics of their choice for each column in their table.
- Created collapsible annotations that allow users to include large amounts of text in annotation boxes and then collapse
them down to a small info icon when not being viewed.
- Ensured the quality of JMP Clinical and Genomic functions in JMP Pro. Both products are built on JMP Pro and are available on Mac for the first time.
- Established a foundation and continued to develop unit tests for JMP Clinical and genomic functions in JMP Pro.
- Translated JMP Clinical UI to Chinese.
- Finalized documents and translation of the JMP Pro Genetics platform to Chinese.
- Published a paper that focused on how the FDA uses JMP Clinical in its NDA.
- Promoted JMP Clinical in multiple conferences through presentations and workshops.
It's so easy to focus on the day-to-day struggles right now, so thank you for the reminder to look up and appreciate the great successes we've had this year. What a great article...what impressive growth we've had!
2023 was an amazing year, and can't wait to see what 2024 holds for JMP!
Thanks for sharing! It's suprised and happy to see such great successes we had in 2023. Look forward to 2024!
It's good to hear about all the successes we've achieved over the year that we're not always aware of. Well done to all of you (all of us)!
Impressive! Thank you for sharing this overview. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Amazing amount of change, but the fantastic JMP culture stays the same. We're all in this together!
