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.

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 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

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.