FinancialForce extend the Dream

#StruckbyLightning

Supporting the analytics and reporting updates was the announcement that FinancialForce products, including FinancialForce Professional Services Automation (PSA), FinancialForce Human Capital Management (HCM) and FinancialForce Accounting, have been certified ‘Lightning Ready’. The Lightning platform which is the new Salesforce User Interface allowing users to develop widgets and dashboards rapidly that can be deployed to desktop, mobiles and tablets almost instantaneously.

It is this functionality that has enabled the profitability widget mentioned earlier and it will be interesting to see how the customer community develops and adds further to the ideas that FinancialForce have started. This integration with Salesforce.com is vital if FinancialForce.com want to leverage the advantage they have. With Sage Live suddenly around it will be important for FinancialForce to maintain their technical lead over its bigger brand rival.

This integration has not been quick as Andrew Fawcett, CTO of FinancialForce.com explained: “For months, our development team has been working closely with Salesforce to get #struckybylightning and become certified Lightning Ready and we can’t wait to continue building and innovating our apps using these new tools.

“Salesforce Lightning brings a new level of sophistication and usability to our FinancialForce ERP apps and gives our customers more ability to extend and customize than ever before. We can now give users even greater control over the way they use our apps and build their own modern views on the Salesforce App Cloud, across any device.”

Conclusion

FinancialForce has kicked off their appearance at Dreamforce with a bigger dream for its customers. Delivering a financial ecosystem where there are benefits delivered for end users and management accountants alike. This investment and improvements to the reporting and analytics engine push FinancialForce to a level that can deliver business benefit that if taken advantage of will be well received by its customers.

In delivering Salesforce Wave integration and having already created the BI environment it may mean that some of the work for the Data Scientists is already done. There are however some questions still remaining.  While delivering the additional reporting functionality have they delivered too much choice?  Will users know which feature is best for them and how to use it.

One of the issues with too much choice is that users start to use one feature without realising what the true power of the other features are. They become experts in one, but can become frustrated as it doesn’t quite do what they want.

Will FinancialForce take a step closer to integration with Office365? With the Sage announcement of a partnership with Microsoft they may find that despite the tight integration with Salesforce users consider the Microsoft link more important.

Being Lightning ready is important, but what follows and how will FinancialForce support its user base to develop the add-ons and business benefits for its application? It will be interesting to see whether FinancialForce add some free components to the Lightning Component Stores in the near future.