FinancialForce.com Warns Businesses to Beware of FrankenCloud

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - May 4, 2015) - FinancialForce.com, the leading cloud ERP provider on the Salesforce1 Platform, today announced a new education initiative designed to raise awareness on the drawbacks of building a business using a patchwork collection of disparate cloud applications and technologies, otherwise known as a FrankenCloud. The company created the "Beware of the FrankenCloud" initiative to expose legacy vendors who have bought their way into the cloud by acquiring cloud companies with existing subscription revenues, and to challenge cloud ERP providers who tout expanded portfolios from acquisitions that are cobbled together in an attempt to connect different architectures, user interfaces, reporting tools and development environments.

"When companies use disconnected databases with different user interfaces, security models and reporting tools, not only do they end up spending more time and money synchronizing data and figuring out how people and processes traverse across applications, but they end up missing out on key growth opportunities because of the effort required to keep the lumbering FrankenCloud alive," said Jeremy Roche, CEO of FinancialForce.com. "We want to put our stake in the ground and make sure that companies are aware of this problem before it deeply affects their financials and productivity. The benefits of investing in a one-platform solution far outweigh the empty promises of a FrankenCloud and it's time to shed light on this industry-wide problem to help organizations avoid the exact same business challenges that transpired in the on-premise era."

FinancialForce ERP, built on the Salesforce1 Platform, provides users with a single database, sign-on and user interface, enabling a single, consistent view of its customers across CRM and ERP. FinancialForce applications are helping numerous customers untangle from the monstrous disaster that is FrankenCloud. Here's what a few of them have to say:

Jon Gingell, vice president of shared services at OpenSymmetry
"Previous to implementing FinancialForce, we had been using NetSuite OpenAir along with a handful of other systems -- textbook definition of a FrankenCloud. It just wasn't working for us, especially when it came to inputting time and expenses. It was still a very time intensive manual process, data was not interconnected and it limited our ability to drive our business forward. Since transitioning to FinancialForce PSA our project visibility has increased immensely and we've saved an incredible amount of time across the board. The net results of speed and fidelity of data has enabled us to reduce our monthly close time by 80 percent and enabled us to grow 40 percent more of our business." 

Brendan Connolly, head of Pactera's Enterprise in the Cloud Practice in Australia
 "As a trusted consulting partner to Fortune 500 companies all over the world, we knew that we needed to be an example of a company that was supporting customers efficiently through technology, but we had built a FrankenCloud without even realizing. We had been using NetSuite OpenAir for project accounting and management but found its disconnection from CRM and other solutions we were using, on varying platforms, to be inflexible and prone to errors. Since deploying FinancialForce PSA, we have experienced immediate benefits. We pride ourselves on delivering the best work to our clients, and since unifying our CRM and PSA solutions on the Salesforce1 Platform, we no longer have to worry about our own client information slowing us down."

Shaun De Lacy, assistant director of enterprise systems at INTO
"Before we took on FinancialForce.com, we had disparate, fragmented systems, or simply put, FrankenClouds, that took us quite a lot of effort, both in time and resources to pull back and coordinate the central view needed to inform the decision making process. By adopting a single cloud solution, of course, we're able to almost instantly analyze the information, make faster and smarter decisions and understand what's going on in real-time."

David Hannaford, CFO at Milrose
"As our company grew, we started to use a patchwork of various systems to do our accounting, invoicing and financial reporting. Those disjointed systems became problematic. Because our invoices and proposals were generated from different systems, they did not match, which was very confusing to our clients and delayed collections. We needed to unify all of our critical business apps on one platform -- integration wasn't sufficient, we needed one source of data for the life of a project from proposal to invoice to financial reporting. Now, our proposals are being generated through Salesforce and match exactly our invoicing through FinancialForce, we have a clear history to show the clients, so they fully understand, not only that single invoice, but the history of all invoices and payments through the duration of the project." 

To learn more about the "Beware of FrankenCloud" initiative, visit: http://erpfrankencloud.com. 

About FinancialForce.com
FinancialForce.com delivers ERP at Customer Speed™. Built on the Salesforce1 Platform, FinancialForce ERP equips customer-centric businesses with a unified platform that delivers ERP and CRM on a single cloud. Our Financial Management, Human Capital Management (HCM), Professional Services Automation (PSA), and Supply Chain Management (SCM) apps allow businesses to increase the speed at which they operate and be more responsive along every touch point of a customer's journey. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in San Francisco, FinancialForce.com is backed by leading global institutions Salesforce, Technology Crossover Ventures, Advent International and UNIT4.

To learn more please follow us on Twitter @FinancialForce, visit our Facebook page or visit http://www.financialforce.com.