Salesforce has a long history of acknowledging and identifying its champions amongst practitioners and consultants. There is a special culture in the Salesforce community with its cartoon mascots and theme of blazing trails. If you’ve worked in the Salesforce ecosystem, you’ve no doubt heard about the “Ohana” (a Hawaiian word roughly translated to family), which can be described as the commitment to community amongst Salesforce employees, partners, and customers. In the spirit of this culture and to highlight “Trailblazers” who are doing more with emerging Salesforce products, they introduced the Champions program in 2018.
SpringML had three team members join the program in 2019 and is adding more in 2020. As the leader of our Salesforce delivery team, I could not be more proud of the hard work that these Champions do, along with their commitment to sharing their knowledge and passion with the Salesforce community.
Analytics Champions

Nicolai Johnson-Borelli
Data Analyst
Nicolai joined SpringML at the beginning of 2017, coming to us as an experienced Salesforce consultant who was an early enthusiast for “Wave” (the old product name for Einstein Analytics). Nico leads a Meetup group in his home city of Minneapolis and has presented at several sessions at Dreamforce and other events. He was inducted in the inaugural class of Analytics Champions in 2019.

Robert Anderson
Architect
Robert came to SpringML as an experienced data warehouse and business intelligence consultant at the beginning of 2017. He quickly became acclimated to Einstein Analytics and has emerged as a key leader in our team. He is also a multi-time Dreamforce speaker and consistently helps our customers advance their capabilities with Einstein Analytics. Robert joins the Analytics Champions program this year.

Gene James
Data Analyst
Gene was a team member at a Salesforce ISV Partner and certified Admin before coming to SpringML in 2018. He is now an Einstein Analytics veteran having helped about a dozen customers deploy and enable insights and dashboards. Gene has been active in the Indianapolis Salesforce community presenting at the local user group and has been a SpringML brand ambassador to the Salesforce Pathfinder program. Gene is also a new inductee to the Analytics Champions program this year.

Matt Wittlief
VP Salesforce Delivery
Yours truly is also humbled and honored to be added to the Analytics Champions program this year. I joined SpringML in late 2015 coming with years of experience in analytics and general business leadership. I have seen this product grow and mature over several years and been involved with countless projects and customers.
Einstein Champions

Brachston Grubbs
Data Analyst
Brachston joined SpringML in early 2019 after serving as an analytics and data consultant prior to that. He has been a pioneer in using newer Salesforce Einstein features like Next Best Action and Case Classification and uses his wide array of skills to help customers and communities to better understand and utilize AI in their business processes. Brachston was in the inaugural Einstein Champions class last year.

Ram Palanki
Data Analyst
Ram is a long-time SpringML veteran having joined our team in early 2016. He’s been a part of numerous Einstein Analytics projects and began working with other Einstein capabilities as they emerged. He has done work with Einstein Vision and other AI/ML features. Ram has also been a Dreamforce speaker multiple times; he was inducted into the first class of Einstein Champions last year.