Telegraph CIO on mixing cloud & on-prem

Posted by Emma Hoyle on 25 March 2010 | 0 Comments

Tags: Business Managers, IT Professionals

Silicon.com ran a great article this week following an interview with the Telegraph's CIO, Paul Cheesbrough. As highlighted in a recent FinancialForce.com webinar, The Telegraph Group is a customer that has been working to move a number of back-office applications into the cloud, while keeping some of its more specialist applications on-premises and linking the two.

Telegraph Media Group already runs an Agresso in-house financial package which is used for general ledger and company accounting, but Cheesbrough said he wants to make this in-house technology "more connected to the cloud" by using FinancialForce. Paul says: "We've taken part of our financial workflow and we've lifted it into the cloud. So we use [FinancialForce] to maximise the power of the cloud but also to bridge back into the on-premise finance application that we've got which we're not ready to replace yet."

As the company keeps much of its advertising sales-related financial data in the cloud with Salesforce.com's CRM, it made sense to use FinancialForce, which runs on the same platform, to manage invoices and billing for customers, he said. This is a growing trend we are seeing (on Tuesday we announced a new SAP integration we have developed).

Many companies want to quickly and easily generate financial transactions from their salesforce.com applications and present them for posting to their on-premises ERP. This approach enables larger organizations to close the finance loop and benefit from the best cloud technology without compromising their existing ERP. Because our online cloud accounting solution is built on the Force.com platform and 'speaks salesforce', we are the obvious choice for accounting middleware.