Yesterday evening, FinancialForce.com inked a deal which sees them acquiring Appirio‘s professional services solution. Why does this matter and why should you care?
The last year has seen FinancialForce.com make steady progress as a cloud based solution built on Salesforce.com’s Force.com development platform. A steady stream of upgrades has allowed the company to strengthen its position as a horizontal accounting solution that complements Salesforce.com’s CRM. However, while it is finding traction in some vertical markets such as franchising and media, the company realizes that rapid growth demands greater vertical market strength. [pullshow]
Professional services is a large market that UNIT4, its parent, serves well in the on-premise world but which has specific functional requirements. The acquisition provides a shortcut to that market along with a ready made portfolio of customers including Salesforce.com. From the blurbs:
…services companies can run all of their core systems – including marketing, sales and customer management; services management and delivery; and accounting and reporting – on a single solution. And by taking advantage of FinancialForce Billing, Appirio customers can now make the process of invoicing and collecting cash as swift as possible, maximizing cash flow during the lifecycle of a project.
Given the relative immaturity of cloud based vertical market solutions you might wonder why FinancialForce.com has made this move. I met with Jeremy Roche CEO and president FinancialForce.com just as the company inked the deal: “It is a natural fit for our expertise in financial accounting and more broadly in PS. But then it helps that Appirio is next door and we’ve worked together on other things. Our UNIT4 colleagues sense tested what we’re getting into and it ticked all the right boxes.”
[pullthis]FinancialForce.com can now compete directly with NetSuite OpenAir which has already won significant deals[/pullthis] at Siemens and Software AG but with a different story. FinancialForce’s PS Enterprise as it is dubbed is native to the Force.com platform. That means no integration issues for customers needing a functional combination between accounting, CRM and PS specific functions like time, materials and project management. “It’s a much simpler solution. From what we’ve seen during due diligence, customers love that,” said Jeremy.
Conceptually, I like this deal. It expands FinancialForce.com’s developer bandwidth (the team is now 70 strong), provides extended customer reference sites and genuine ‘we eat our own dog food’ story, complements the broader UNIT4 portfolio while cementing FinancialForce.com’s position as a serious cloud player.
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