I attended the roundtable event yesterday to provide a user and developer perspective on Chatter based on our experiences at FinancialForce.com. The event was attended by some leading industry analysts who heard from different customers about their experiences.

Tim Barker, Salesforce’s VP of Strategy, EMEA, did a great job facilitating the event and provided a round-up of the Chatter Private Beta customer survey results. Parts of this survey have been quoted extensively in the media, but I still find the results compelling. Success metrics include:

- 27% increase in collaboration and team work (pretty hard to measure)

- 19% improvement in Salesforce user adoption

- 3% increase in sales revenue

- 90% indicate they will likely continue to use Chatter in the future.

That’s impressive! We are already sold on the application and our customers are finding that the collaboration it delivers improves customer service dramatically and facilitates sales, but it’s still a difficult concept to sell to anyone that hasn’t tried it. I was asked following my presentation, ‘if we had to pay for Chatter, what business case would we present to the CFO?’ And it struck me when thinking about an answer just how difficult a sell it is, which is why Enterprise 2.0 organizations major on the problems with user adoption. Without trying it out first, I don’t believe you’d even have the basis for a discussion with the CFO. But then you’d need to show where you have/could have lost revenue as a result of not having Chatter and where you have won deals on the back of better collaboration.

These things are difficult to measure. Salesforce.com private beta customers measured the improved time taken to find information, and the increase in close rates among other things. If Salesforce.com could provide a compelling guide to measuring your Chatter success and presenting a business case, I don’t see how it can fail.

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In a blog post , Damian Saunders, CEO, Cogent Online, gives an excellent real-life account of migrating to the cloud and setting-up FinancialForce Accounting. Six months in, and he quotes a message he received from the General Manager which is poignant - “Imagine if we never had SalesForce and FinancialForce. Arghh!”

Other companies who have travelled this road are equally enthused and certain that their decision was the right one. With the benefits starting to rack up, there is an increasingly compelling argument for cloud accounting.

Susan Randal, Controller at WiFi Alliance, is keen to point out several key frontline benefits in tying CRM to accounting working with FinancialForce.com. The net result? Empowered frontline employees. In a recent interview with Dennis Howlett she talked about the empowerment the move to FinancialForce Accounting had given their employees along with the massive time savings when generating invoices and reports.

“It naturally follows that you get real time reporting and a reduction in the time to getting management reports out,” she says. “Time saved here means time spent on value added functions.”

Gary White, CEO, White Springs was also interviewed recently and again highlights the significant benefits of cloud accounting to his organization, not only relating to cost and time savings. FinancialForce Accounting has given them complete confidence in the numbers they are reporting. 

It’s relatively early days for cloud accounting, and market data shows it will be another five years before we come close to the adoption levels of CRM. What those considering the move cannot ignore is the compelling case being made by early adopters - from migration and set-up to the visible frontline benefits being delivered.

I’m attending a roundtable event on Monday organized by salesforce.com to discuss the merits of Chatter and the application in action. I’m looking forward to hearing other people’s experiences. The audience will be made up of EMEA industry analysts who will be provided with an update on Chatter’s progress and will be joined by salesforce.com customers who will share details of how they are making use of Chatter within their organizations.

FinancialForce.com has been invited for a few reasons. To discuss our own use of Chatter, how we have embedded it in our FinancialForce Accounting app and how we have built additional apps using Chatter
as a platform.

From our own experience and that of our customers so far, the main benefit by far is that Chatter highlights potential business issues to the right people before they become a problem, which in the end enables better customer service. We also note that it helps connect sales and finance over and above what integration between systems can do. If accounts and sales are alerted to a helpdesk issue, they will have a better understanding of why a customer might not be paying an outstanding bill, or why that customer isn’t extending their contract and a resolution can be found quickly for mutual benefit. In the words of one of our customers that I spoke with recently, “sales is finance and finance is sales, the two things go hand in hand….”

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.

Gary White, CEO of White Springs was recently interviewed by Dennis Howlett talking about the benefits of cloud accounting and FinancialForce Accounting. You can watch the video here. White Springs is reliant on Salesforce CRM as its central business system. It helps them manage lead capture, opportunities, customer relationships, contracts, customer support, business development and timesheets, and according to Gary, has surpassed all expectations in terms of what it could deliver.

The fact that FinancialForce Accounting was built with the same attention to detail and extended functionality compared to a lot of the cloud accounting solutions on the market was attractive.

The combination of cloud CRM and cloud accounting is providing some significant benefits. White Springs has one single view of every customer account so everyone across the business is working from the same information. Sales and finance can see which customers have been billed, what they have been billed for and what has been collected. Previously, those responsible for debt collection had been running in isolation from the rest of the business. Now they can see opportunities in the pipeline and support cases that might influence a customer’s willingness to settle up.

Gary explained where they are seeing some significant time savings. “Now that we don’t have to manage a deferred revenue spreadsheet, we can rely on the information in the monthly management reports, they are quick and easy to produce, and we have no spreadsheets to worry about outside of the system. Our accounting team has saved at least 20% of the time that was spent posting invoices manually. It’s all automated from an opportunity being closed in the CRM to an invoice going out from FinancialForce. Preparation of the monthly management accounts takes only one day now instead of two. These savings are significant for a business like ours.�

Yes, it’s official. Salesforce today announced the availability of Chatter following a private Beta which has already yielded some great feedback. Marc Benioff says that:

“Based on the [experience of the beta trial users], 90 percent of participants surveyed indicated they would recommend Chatter to others. Specifically, these customers reported a 27 percent increase in collaboration and a 22 percent improvement in productivity with Chatter.”

That’s pretty impressive and from our own use of Chatter within FinancialForce.com we’d agree. We’d describe it as a combination between Twitter, Facebook and Google Wave, focused on the enterprise. It has reduced e-mail volumes at FinancialForce, especially the long and fragmented message chains in which it’s sometimes difficult to discern who started a conversation, who is involved in it and what actions need to be taken. It makes it easier to see and respond to things which means you can be more proactive in dealing with issues as they arise because you see them so much earlier.

FinancialForce.com has built Chatter collaboration into FinancialForce Accounting and we see great benefits for innovative customers (as laid out previously). And with the price tag outlined by Salesforce (free to users and $15 per month to non users), now everyone can benefit.

We are in Boston today attending an industry analyst event called The Grape Escape along with Susan Randal from the WiFi Alliance who will talk about the organization’s experiences with FinancialForce Accounting.

The annual event is in its 10th year and is being attended by more than two dozen global technology analysts, some we have met before and some we haven’t. They will hear from different tech vendors about their future strategy and success to date, as well as receiving news announcements and hearing from customers.

At the event, we are making two new announcements. The second I will tell you more about when we announce to the market on Monday. The first has been much anticipated. We have released Summer ‘10, the fourth generation release of FinancialForce Accounting. This is significant for a number of reasons.

This new version includes significant new features and a Chatter powered inter-departmental collaboration engine. As the only accounting application that ‘speaks Salesforce’, the collaborative element of this release will set FinancialForce Accounting customers apart.

Customers will benefit from collaboration around business processes like order to cash, which dissolve inter-departmental boundaries that hinder the running of an effective business. The Chatter-enabled FinancialForce application will allow more frequent and effective collaboration around sales opportunities, customer accounts and service issues in order to achieve best pricing and payment structures for big deals or avoid costly payment delays and disputes.

The latest FinancialForce release has been developed with a focus on making accounting processes even more efficient for users. It includes a completely new user interface with an enhanced look and feel, increased depth of functionality related to intercompany accounting and revenue recognition, and a faster pay process.

Click here to view the full announcement and customer endorsements of FinancialForce Accounting.Â

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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Today we announced a partnership with CloudApps, a new company that delivers a Force.com-based emission management solution. Together, we will provide an end-to-end carbon management and accounting solution. Companies of any size will be able to measure, monitor and account for their current carbon emissions and engage with their employees to dramatically reduce future emission levels and operational costs.

Customers will be able to manage the emissions, costs and the cash flow implications of carbon. And because of the advantages cloud technology affords, they will always have access to the latest technology dealing with the latest legislation.

The full announcement can be viewed here www.financialforce.com/carbon-accounting