FinancialForce has announced its first successes on GCloud. Two wins this year have involved the National Audit Office (NAO) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Together, as of October 2016, they had spent more than £620,000 on the ERP solution based on the Salesforce platform.
The NAO started its engagement in February and has spent £483,469.19 up to October 2016 with FinancialForce. It is still too early to say how large the contract is as most of the expenditure to date is probably the consultancy and start up costs. FinancialForce were unable to provide much additional information about the deal with the NAO. The initiative by the NAO forms part of the government’s drive to save the taxpayer money. The Government Digital Service controls £391 million of the £1.7bn spend on government IT according to Whitehall Media. The governments intention is to move away from the legacy applications and onto shared platform services.
The FCA project began invoicing in July and through October has spent £137,753. The FCA is using FinancialForce PSA in its supervision division. The intention is to increase project visibility and to help standardise the way of working across the department. In some ways this is no different from the private sector where professional services firms seek similar goals.
Jeremy Roche, president and CEO of Financial force commented: “Many of the common problems we see from customers who come to us to help them transform their businesses we also see from UK public sector organisations. It is imperative that these organisations are spending resources in the most efficient way possible and both switching technology systems and moving more closely to a single platform strategy is a key part of how they can achieve this. We look forward to helping the National Audit Office and the Financial Conduct Authority save time and resource through our applications.”
More growth to come?
When we spoke to Jeremy Roche earlier this year he was excited by these wins. FinancialForce will hope that they open to the door to other government departments. There is competition though. Legacy vendors such as Oracle have increased their efforts to migrate government departments to the cloud. The Office of National Statistics chose to upgrade their legacy Oracle solution to Oracle Cloud with Certus the partner chosen to do the task.
FinancialForce do better where Salesforce is already in place. Fortunately several government departments and NHS organisations already use the CRM platform. The list of these includes:, British Council, The Crown Commercial Service, Companies House, NHS Direct and NHS England. Whether FinancialForce can add these to its portfolio will be interesting to see.
Conclusion
FinancialForce has several listings on the Digital marketplace including accounting, professional services automation, HCM and supply chain. That they have finally cracked a sales in the UK Government through GCloud is good news. With the references that these two organisations can provide they will hope that further deals will follow. Interestingly neither the NAO or the FCA bought Salesforce through GCloud. This infers that the target market for FinancialForce may be far wider and healthier than the information available from GCloud sales suggests.
