Dreamforce 09 in San Francisco saw 19,000 people attend salesforce.com’s biggest event of the year, and it was the first major outing for FinancialForce.com and the team since the re-brand and launch in early October.

Excitingly this time we were joined by customers from all over the world, all of whom seemed to be 100% positive about their experiences with setting up and using FinancialForce. A group of them took part in our seminar, each standing up in front of a packed crowd and telling their story of how cloud accounting was improving their business.

Here are some of our customers at the event, captured on video:

• Sallie Kennedy, CFO of The ComplianceTeam, Inc. (Highlights: ‘Cost effective; outstanding support; better reporting; improved forecasting; 9% cost reduction in billing process’)
• David Tan, Quattro Innovation (Highlights: ‘real-time reporting; consistent experience with salesforce.com; rapid deployment; happy board of directors!’)

And you can see Jeremy Roche, FinancialForce.com CEO, talking about the event and busy the team were – ‘averaging one lead a minute on the stand’. Now that’s some some level of excitement!

The level of coverage for FinancialForce.com throughout the event was staggering - from Twitter and blog posts to YouTube commentators and customers were getting excited about FinancialForce. As one person put it, ‘cloud accounting is finally here’!

We’re all very excited about Dreamforce this year and for good reason!
Firstly we’ll be showing off our Winter 10 release, which has some dramatically enhanced functionality! The release is really pertinent in today’s climate and addresses some key issues to help you get your cash in faster. Come along and see it at booth 416.

Secondly we’re hosting a really exciting session with a group of our customers. They will be explaining why they chose FinancialForce Accounting, what issues it addresses in their business, and the benefits the application has brought to them. It’s a truly global session with customers from the US, the UK and even Australia! And there will be plently of time for them to answer your questions, so come along to North 125 on Wednesday November 18 at 2.15pm. The session is titled Accounting for Success, and hosted by Debbie Ashton, our VP of Product.

Finally, we’ve recruited a really strong team into our San Mateo office and they will all be on our stand to listen to your requirements and discuss your options.

See you there!

Following the recent launch of FinancialForce.com as a ‘spin out’ from Unit 4 Agresso and with investment from Salesforce.com, it’s been fascinating to watch the response of the competition.

Straight after the announcement, various accounting software suppliers in the SaaS (software as a service) or ‘cloud accounting’ space rushed out prepared statements that tried to both welcome the arrival of a new competitor and dismiss it as more publicity stunt than serious threat. One competitor was so dismissive and unconcerned about the arrival of FinancialForce.com that it issued prepared statements to all of its executives to use in the press, with the strange effect that various individuals got quoted saying exactly the same words!

Others got defensive and tried to spread some negativity on Twitter.

They all quickly realised that by talking about us so publicly they were having the opposite effect – giving us publicity and making it clear they were rattled! So they went suddenly quiet.

But not totally quiet. We now hear that various companies and individuals are making negative comments to prospects and commentators ‘off the record’. They fall into two categories, both laughable when they are analysed:

-          That FinancialForce.com doesn’t have many customers.
-          That it is a ‘legacy product’!

Regarding customers, of course we don’t have as many on FinancialForce.com as some of the older vendors who’ve been around for many years… that’s what happens when you have a new product – you have to build up a user base. However, we have a growing and enthusiastic user base and some of them are helping raise our profile by adding their names to our example customer area, approving press releases or giving interviews with the press and for case studies.

Of course we’d always like more to do publicity, but we have to remember that customers don’t take FinancialForce.com to give us kudos – they choose it because it helps them to run their businesses more efficiently, and they’re all fast growing and dynamic organizations.

As for the ‘legacy product’ jibe – what a joke! FinancialForce.com was developed from scratch on the Force.com platform, salesforce.com’s own enterprise cloud computing platform. It’s a new application – well, we’ve been developing it now for around 2 years, so it’s maturing fast and is now a highly functional, international accounting system. It does benefit from CODA’s three decades of experience in developing accounting systems on a range of new (at the time) technologies – from HP3000 to Digital VAX to the IBM AS/400 and then open. client server platforms.

So we understand all the challenges of developing an application that will not only do your bookkeeping, but also the accounting and financial management that growing organizations of all sizes need. And we’ve refined a ‘single ledger’ design that delivers true real-time accounting, regardless of your size, and is still the most modern approach to accounting on the market.

That’s the result of experience – not legacy technology.

Kind of ironic to get such jibes from vendors whose SaaS applications have been around for a decade, give or take. Which is the one looking long in the tooth?

The US FinancialForce team are off to the PayPal Innovate conference tomorrow. We will be demonstrating some particularly exciting new integrations utilising Website Payments from PayPal to allow customers an easy way to pay their invoices electronically. We will also be presenting jointly with salesforce.com and showing off our recent Force.com sites development integrated with PayPal.