IDG Contributor Network: May the (Financial) Force be with you. ERP upstarts and new user experiences

When FinancialForce was created a few years ago, the decision was made to build its financial management system on top of the Salesforce platform. There were many reasons to do so: reduced engineering requirement, an active sales funnel and the ability to leverage existing Salesforce commercial relationships among them. But at the same time as the company was able to leverage the benefits of building on an existing platform, it also had to reconcile the fact that said platform was CRM-centric and delivering a financial-centric product that would take a degree of engineering.

A few years on, now with a bunch of customers, some key acquisitions and a strategic investment by Salesforce itself, we have a company that has moved on from being purely about financials and now proudly claims the ERP moniker. It has built out its product with some key acquisitions (most notably in the professional services automation and human resources management areas) and it has begun to have credibility generated by its own performance, not just from reflected Salesforce glory.

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