In a guest post on TechCrunch, Marc Benioff of salesforce.com talks about why enterprise software should take its cues from Facebook and become more social.

In it he asks why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?

Typically, social networking tools and business have been kept very separate. The fact that many bosses have banned the use of these tools and labelled them unproductive has not helped. But like anything, it’s about how they are put to use. The technology behind sites like Amazon is impressive and is something all enterprise software vendors can learn from. So, the question is – how can we repurpose these tools, based on the kind of technology we are all used to using in our personal lives, to enhance our work lives?

Cross department communication is still a problem in the workplace. We still work in silos at our individual workstations despite in many cases spending our personal lives socialising online. Actions are often delayed if someone is out of the office and not accessing email, which is still the communication tool of choice. Many companies are making good use of tools like Instant Messenger, but what if we could extend those benefits for more advantage? If Chatter and similar enterprise tools can help overcome this and some of the problems related to antiquated software that many companies still rely on, based on the kind of technology we all know and love, that has got to be a good thing. Then if department specific processes can be built in aimed at specific and only relevant groups, it has to be a no-brainer.

At FinancialForce.com, we are looking at how we deliver extra advantage to our customers using these tools. From the perspective of an online accounting software vendor that speaks salesforce, we believe that as more and more businesses grow their presence on sites like Facebook, there are integration opportunities to enable better collaboration with business for finance related processes. We’ll talk more about this in the coming weeks so watch this space…

The Telegraph Media Group (TMG) is one of the UK’s largest media groups. In this online webinar on Thursday, Toby Wright, TMG’s Chief Technology Officer, will explain its widely publicized move to the Cloud and how FinancialForce Accounting will help to achieve their objectives and specifically:

• Why TMG is moving many of its systems to the cloud
• The benefits this strategy is reaping
• Why TMG selected FinancialForce.com for online accounting to support its advertising sales
• The advantages of having sales and finance inextricably linked on Salesforce.com’s platform
• The next steps in TMG’s strategy

Additional guest speakers include Jeremy Roche, CEO, FinancialForce.com and Dennis Howlett, ZDNet’s Industry Analyst and Expert in IT related Finance for over 30 years.

It’s always great to hear from end users of SaaS applications themselves and to hear about how they have approached SaaS adoption and how those applications sit with other on-premises technology as is often the case. This ComputerWorld article called “Beyond CRM: SaaS slips into the mainstream” makes for interesting reading. It includes case studies from companies using SaaS applications talking about the IT evaluation process and the importance of weighing up SaaS and on-premises technology and combining the two. It is not always a clear-cut decision and therefore is necessary to put in place people who understand SaaS and can co-exist in a mixed environment.

Schumacher Group CIO Doug Menefee provides some wise words: “Everything here is driven by business requirements… All new applications aren’t automatically SaaS-based. Whenever we have a business need, we evaluate what our existing architecture is, and we go to both teams and ask them to come back with proposals to address the problem.”

Investment Bank, Goldman Sachs, has released a new technology report emailed to subscribers last week, titled ‘Techtonics: Unstoppable shift to SaaS continues’. It confirms the rise in popularity of SaaS and highlights the areas where utilization is increasing.

The diagram below shows that accounting and billing is the 3rd most popular area for SaaS adoption at 49%. Interestingly, the report also says that it has been the biggest growth area since April 2009 at 20%, ahead of call center automation and eRecruitment.

cnet.com covers the report and provides a few highlights:

•An “SaaS first” policy is being enacted in the majority of small and midsize businesses. Goldman’s survey highlights that 58 percent of respondents always consider an SaaS option when making an application purchase decision. At total of 39 percent prefer an SaaS option, if available.
•Web conferencing and sales force automation continue to rank as the most utilized SaaS applications; accounting and billing shows significant improvement, underscoring broad acceptance in all application areas.
•Accounting and billing, call center automation, and eRecruiting were the largest gainers, with 20 percent, 18 percent, and 17 percent increases, respectively, from April 2009.
•Data warehousing, supply chain management, and product life cycle management require more customization, or are more embedded within the core of a company than cloud applications. They are also utilized by a smaller group of individuals, which could impact the time to, or volume of, deployments.
•Amazon.com is used by 67 percent of the survey respondents. It is clearly the out-in-front leader, despite being a “newcomer” to enterprise IT. For internal clouds, VMware’s leadership remains pronounced, with 83 percent of respondents using its virtualization technology.
•Platform-as-a-service layers are gaining momentum, dominated by Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, service, with 77 percent of respondents choosing EC2 as a preferred partner, well ahead of Google
•Forty percent of respondents indicated that they would be more likely to use SaaS solutions in a weaker economy, due to perceived total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits

Cogent Online (cogentads.com) is the latest FinancialForce.com user to leave a positive review on the salesforce.com AppExchange. Giving the application 5 out of 5, Damian Saunders says it has helped the company bridge the gap between sales and finance. He says:

“Successful online advertising and performance marketing is all about metrics and analytics.
At Cogent Online (Cogentads.com) we were frustrated in our attempts to measure our performance by the separation of our sales and financial systems necessitating the use of laborious manual reporting.
FinancialForce has resolved all of that for us. We now have complete end to end metrics for sales and finance out of the one platform. We are now in a position to easily automate many of the processes we use, giving us greater efficiency. Combine that with direct support and contact with the FinancialForce team and this is easily the best infrastructure decision we have made. FinancialForce bridged the gap for us.”

Excellent result!

We are pleased to report that FinancialForce.com has been named one of the “20 Coolest Cloud Productivity App Vendors” by Everything Channel’s CRN… and cited as one of 20 apps that solution providers and their customers should be aware of.