On July 22nd, we are sponsoring a EuroCloud event at The Hempel in London. The event will focus on cloud computing based on the themes of a recently published book called The New Polymath by Vinnie Mirchandani. The book which references FinancialForce.com focuses on an enterprise that excels in multiple technologies - infotech, cleantech, healthtech, and other tech - and leverages multiple talent pools to create new medicine, new energy, and new algorithms. The book is the first to illustrate the diversity of today’s technology palette and to profile over 150+ innovative people, products and places.

Vinnie, better known as Deal Architect coaches enterprises on how to exploit disruptive technology trends. He is a former Gartner analyst and PwC consultant and now a prolific blogger.

Cloud computing is a clear example of Polymath application in infotech. Vinnie will draw from many case studies from the book including salesforce.com, financialforce.com, Appirio and Amazon web services to show how this new model is reshaping enterprise computing.

The book is getting some fantastic reviews and really showcases the innovation that is central to today’s successful enterprises.

For more information about this event, for directions and to register, visit the event website.

Today, we announced a new VMforce connector service that will enable Java developers to quickly and easily build FinancialForce Accounting functionality into their own VMforce applications. The key points of note are:

• It opens the doors for VMforce Java developers that want fast, easy access to enterprise accounting functionality on the Force.com platform.
• It will significantly reduce configuration and set up time of the FinancialForce Accounting web services layer.
• It will leverage key features of the well established Spring framework, such as tight IDE integration and many framework features such as Sprint Web Flow
• Out of the box, VMforce developers will have access to the accounting functionality they need to make their apps enterprise-ready quickly and easily.

The great thing about this is that customers will be able to choose from the latest VMforce Java developed applications while still benefiting from the most advanced accounting app on the platform. Developers normally have to configure and set up the FinancialForce.com web services layer which is a technical job and can be time consuming. The plan is that FinancialForce.com will deliver that configuration to them out of the box enabling VMforce developers to develop apps quicker and be more productive. It’s still early days, but we expect to have a lot more to announce around the time the VMforce developer preview becomes available, currently slated for later this year.

We’re attending this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston and opening keynotes are currently underway. It is the first time we’ve attended this event and we’ve heard good things about it. It is a gathering place for the growing community of business and IT people bringing enterprise-class collaboration and productivity tools into their organizations. As well as attending panel sessions, we will be meeting with a number of influencers in this space to discuss our own approach to enterprise collaboration and how we see the new generation of tools, like Chatter, breaking down departmental barriers to effective business.

The way we work is changing rapidly and cloud developments have had a big role to play in the way companies procure, implement and use technology. Those that can leverage new tools for more agile and simplified information exchange and collaboration will have a huge competitive edge. Particularly as Cloud has eradicated some of the typical barriers to international expansion. 

Enterprise 2.0 promises to liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email. It provides business managers with access to the right information at the right time and takes advantage of the collective intelligence of many. There are huge implications for how businesses will manage customer service in the future for example. Finance will have a pivotal role to play as a source of business intelligence to solve business issues right across the organization.

We’ll be making another related announcement on Thursday at the Grape Escape analyst event being held in Boston on the 17th. More on that later.

To follow Twitter coverage of Enterprise 2.0 search: #e2conf

We are very proud to announce that FinancialForce Accounting has been shortlisted for “Best Cloud Application” at this year’s Cloud Computing World Series Awards. Part of the Cloud Computing World Forum event at Olympia, London from June 29th to July 1st.

Judged by some senior industry figures, the award winners will be announced on June 29th. From the entries for each category, each judge was asked to select their top three nominations. These were then scored by each judge. FinancialForce Accounting was among one of the three applications that received the most points in the Best Cloud App category.

We will be attending and speaking at this event so hope to see some of you there…

 

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The recent VMforce announcement makes sense for salesforce.com and is an interesting proposition. It was only a matter of time…

It ‘opens up’ the Force.com platform to 6m Java developers and positions it as an open, mainstream PaaS competitor (head-to-head with Azure, Amazon and others…). Here at FinancialForce.com, we are already looking at how we can deliver  our enterprise accounting functionality to Java developers through VMforce. We have lots of ideas already including packaged web services to help developers build our functionality into their apps to significantly simplify configuration and set up. More on that later.

VMforce provides a much needed opportunity to Java developers. It’s early days, but we will wait expectantly to see the innovation that comes out of this.

Damian Saunders at FinancialForce.com customer Cogent recently blogged about his experience so far with FinancialForce Accounting. In future blog posts, he promises to convey their experience, what they have learned, what they like, what they don’t like and how it’s working for them.

So far, the experience has been a good one.

He says “FinancialForce emerged as an option right about the time we realized that there was a gaping need to integrate the Company’s financial management with our CRM platform. We didn’t have an issue with our previous application, we were familiar with it, it’s widely used and accepted, and it did everything we needed, except integrate with Salesforce, or not in a way that we wanted it to…

…FinancialForce gave us that integration. In fact FinancialForce is so integrated with Salesforce that the entire application is as one. We now have complete visibility of our Clients, and Vendors, from initial contact all the way through to invoicing and payment.”

We measure our success on the feedback we get from customers and it’s exciting being able to talk to our customers directly. Damian’s enthusiasm and understanding of cloud developments is a pleasure to see. We hope to hear more about his experiences soon and as always encourage feedback and input into future product versions.  Â

Since we began building Chatterbox and working with Chatter, we have joined the salesforce.com Chatter developers community (DevZone) site where thousands of developers use Chatter to connect with each other, demo new apps, and share and discuss ideas.

We have received some great feedback about our Chatterbox application. One conversation in particular is worth noting.

Ed Schlesinger, a developer at studentforce (@studentforcenow), is excited by the possibilities delivered by Chatterbox. He created a notification system in minutes that works with their student application to notify students of assignments due and can see real value for organisations in Higher Education.

Great example of Chatter in use, the value of Chatterbox and the importance of collaboration.

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As we continue to enjoy the benefits of platform integration we have expanded our Email Template examples for Sales Invoices. This means they better reflect the Email output when using the standard functionality, serving as a better starting point if you wish to customize this area of the product. As before they come in two flavors, one with and one without PDF attachment. They also still illustrate a means to add a PayPal button. Finally don’t forget these are also compatible with our Mass Email production functionality as well.

Today, we announced our new Chatter integration and new business collaboration app, Chatterbox, which has received some very positive reactions. We made the announcements at salesforce.com’s Cloudforce2 event in New York.

 

 

Comments on the news so far:

“For me this is the first potentially large scale business use case of social computing where the direct integration between applications has genuine business meaning.”

Dennis Howlett on his ZDNet blog

 

“The big question is what will hook the enterprise on Chatter. Facebook analogies are nice, but real business cases like those surfaced by Roche will ultimately win the day—even if they won’t sound so great in a keynote.”

Larry Dignan, ZDNet

 

“I’ve always been cautious about social tools that promise to revolutionize the enterprise – but I have to say that an integration between chatter and a third party force.com application really shows the promise these social tools can bring – dragging information kicking and screaming out of the app and to where a user needs it.”

Ben Kepes on cloudave.com

 

“Will it make it? I think so. Is there still a need for proper strategic planning and follow through for large scale uptake? No question about it. But that’s no different from any other enterprise software category. One things for sure – having the software make it simpler to illustrate business cases out of the box makes it a hell of a lot easier to pass the initial litmus test… Finally, social starts to embrace process.”

Sameer Patel, Pretzel Logic, Enterprise 2.0 blog

“…First, FinancialForce, the ever surprising FinancialForce, released Chatterbox - highly customizable and easily configurable Chatter streams associated with activities that you choose to access and subscribe to… What makes this interesting is that by having a substantial number of conditions that you can apply to the specific Chatter stream, you are filtering out what you don’t want and receiving and responding to what you do want.

Note: FinancialForce is a company to reckon with in the salesforce.com ecosystem. Last week they announced integration with SAP - one of the few in that ecosystem who understands the need to do that.” Paul Greenberg, zdnet.com

When was the last time you spoke to your finance team? To chase up late payment of an expense claim perhaps, or to confirm your budget for the year? Maybe you had problems finding details of a customer payment or a customer order? And I bet email was your choice of communication tool every time.

Finance has historically been seen as a back office function where accountants are the people you talk to as a last resort to help you solve a problem. In turn, accountants have typically found that they spend all day problem solving, answering queries and putting out fires.

When you think about it, this makes no sense. Everything in business has some sort of financial impact, and will ultimately end in a debit or credit. So finance professionals can bring a particular, highly useful perspective to most business activities going on. If sales and finance collaborated earlier on putting together sales bids, or customer services brought finance in as soon as there was a client issue, then the business benefits could be massive.

If the wall between front office interaction with customers and back office finance was torn down, the potential for improved responsiveness, better customer service and more efficient business processes is considerable. Accountants need to be put front and centre to drive activity and process in the business, yet despite numerous attempts this hasn’t really happened.

As alluded to in a previous blog post, FinancialForce.com will soon be announcing some work around collaborative accounting and Salesforce Chatter which will do just that; transforming the accounting function and its role within business. Whilst we are passionate about finance and financial processes, by extending this thinking, we can see huge benefits for the rest of the business too.�