Interview With Andra Robinson
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ndra Robinson is Associate General Counsel at the app experience platform Airship. She was formerly the General Counsel for
Concord, a leading contract management SaaS platform, where she had responsibility for all legal, commercial and compliance matters. She is licensed to practice in California and holds a Certified Information Privacy Professional certification.
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What is Airship, and why are contracts and contract cycles central to what it does as a company?
How have privacy regulations impacted the contract cycle, and what problems do those impacts create?
Airship helps brands master mobile app experiences. At the dawn of apps, Airship actually powered the first commercial messages, and has since expanded with a data-led approach to all re-engagement channels — mobile wallet, SMS, email. Our enterprise Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform AXP (short for App Experience Platform), helps product, digital or marketing teams create and adapt rich native app experiences without ongoing developer support. Contracts are central to guiding Airship’s relationship with our customers. The market is increasingly conscious of privacy and data compliance regulations, so our contracts with customers have become more complex. Now they may include the main services agreement, as well as separate data and security agreements. Thinking through all of the data compliance considerations for our customers from the start of the sales cycle means faster contracting cycles, and ultimately faster go-live and deployment cycles for our customers’ apps.
Our customers are routinely working at the forefront of mobile applications. Interactions with their own customers and questions around complying with the evolving privacy landscape are fundamental to how the mobile app will function. These types of questions are no longer exclusive to companies concerned with EU transactions because of the General Data Protection Regulation. Questions about privacy compliance come up in almost all of our pre-sale evaluation and contracting conversations with customers, regardless of their location. For customers based outside the United States, the contract cycle must include time to build up additional trust in how we will protect their data once we go live. Those considerations can typically add 30-90 days to the contract cycle, meaning that brands’ marketers and app developers have to pause their projects while all the data protection agreements are finalized.
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