MailGuard has dropped MYOB in favour of FinancialForce.com adding a financial solution to the Salesforce CRM solution they have used for some time. MailGuard is a privately owned company,   by CEO Craig McDonald in 2001 in Australia it has since grown to have a presence in 27 countries, including offices in the US and UK. MailGuard delivers a range of security solutions from the cloud not just around Email and email filtering which was its first product but also web usage.

FinancialForce.com invests in Australian market

FinancialForce.com recently opened a Sydney office, expanding their presence in the region as part of their global expansion program, helped by the recent $110 million funding round. It is from this office that the MailGuard head office will be serviced and FinancialForce.com will be hoping that this is not the first announcement. That MailGuard were listed as a client on opening this announcement is more of a validation by MailGuard that they have seen the accounting suite deliver the promised benefits to their operation. Narelle Little, CFO at MailGuard commented “Selecting FinancialForce.com to run our accounting was a no-brainer for us,” … “We love that the company is built on the Salesforce1 Platform so we can finally have one source of truth for all our customer data. Not to mention, our workforce will become incredibly more efficient without our homegrown accounting solution. FinancialForce Financial Management will give our employees the ability to access data from anywhere at anytime.”

That Financialforce.com is so tightly integrated with Salesforce means that this will not be the last customer that they wean away from MYOB although the recent Sage announcement on a partnership with Salesforce will not have gone unnoticed the integration is unlikely to be so great.  Certainly those Australian firms using Salesforce already who want a single integrated IT solution to support their business should mark FinancialForce,com down as a serious option to consider.

Strategic Partnership?

That FinancialForce.com is available in the countries that MailGuard operate is a benefit that the security company would have found attractive as well. As MailGuard seeks to expand its own business into the lucrative areas such as the US, it will be interesting to see whether the relationship grows larger than merely a software purchase.  If target market.he relationship can grow into more of a strategic partnership it will be interesting to see whether there is any cross selling between the two.  Certainly FinancialForce.com will be looked for MailGuard to be a reference site for its Australasian market.