FinancialForce.com Gains Momentum In The Cloud

In terms of business environments the most widely used application in the cloud beyond email is clearly customer relationship management (CRM) software. Among CRM applications in the cloud, the most widely used is Saleforce.com.

But it’s what is starting to occur around Salesforce.com that should be getting more attention from solution providers. As sales staffs increasingly rely of Salesforce.com applications, the focal point for managing the entire business is starting to shift to the CRM application. For all intents and purposes, the CRM application in many organizations has become the single source of truth about the customer.

Naturally, it only becomes a matter of time before other departments inside the organization want to access those same customer records. Often, that desire kicks off an expensive integration project that has created many opportunities for the channel. But as many organizations begin to become more cloud centric they are also starting to opt to deploy new applications that can access the same records in Salesforce.com. In fact, that latter approach can often wind up being less expensive than a complex integration project.

The folks at FinancialForce.com are betting heavily that cloud applications are going to carry the day. As a set of enterprise applications that is delivered as a service, FinancialForce.com allows users in the finance department to, for example, access the same records using inside Salesforce.com.

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Seeking to extend its reach in the channel, FinancialForce.com just named Johnny Ola to the new created post of vice president of global alliance and business development. Ola said it’s now more than apparent at this juncture that SaaS application providers such as FinancialForce.com can’t really grow at a much faster rate without help from the channel.

FinancialForce.com just reported that it grew its subscription revenue run rate by 91 percent year-over-year, bringing its total revenue run rate to $50 million. More importantly from a channel perspective, a new report from the IT market research from Saugutuck Technology finds that 21 percent of the CFOs surveyed are either actively evaluating options to replace their financial applications, or have plans to replace their financial management systems in the next 24 months.

That may not seem like a huge number, but when you consider how conservative CFOs tend to be when it comes to IT there may very well be a groundswell of finance application migration.

Taking that idea several steps further, FinancialForce.com has essentially surrounded Salesforce.com with a set of complementary enterprise applications that can all access the same customer records. A new update to the supply chain management (SCM) application developed by FinancialForce.com announced this week even added a Rebate Revenue Module to its SCM application that is specifically optimized for distributors and other organizations that sell through a channel.

Obviously, there’s a lot of fierce competition when it comes to cloud applications. But at the end of the day the portfolio of application services that owns the customer record definitely has the inside track when it comes to creating additional opportunities down the road for its channel partners.