Published on the 06/06/2018 | Written by Newsdesk
ERP cloud vendor FinancialForce has announced a new sales and implementation partnership with Indianapolis-based CX company Appirio…
It’s an agreement that’s been a long time coming and somewhat formalises the long relationship between the two companies: In 2011 FinancialForce acquired PS Enterprise from Appirio to form what is now FinancialForce PSA. Appirio is now a FinancialForce PSA customer which uses the solution as their own consulting operations system.
The announcement is surprising to few and likely comes as part of FinancialForce’s larger growth strategy, seeing the company targeting larger customers in the professional services automation arena. The company says it hopes the agreement will help new services economy companies leverage FinancialForce’s cloud tech “to respond more rapidly to customer demands” as well as offer “enhanced customer-centricity for professional services teams and companies”.
“Appirio’s deep experience with the Salesforce Platform, coupled with FinancialForce’s PSA solution, will help service organisations cope with typical challenges, including optimizing billable utilization, revenue, average project margin, customer satisfaction, and backlog management,” says a FinancialForce spokesperson.
“The partnership should help FinancialForce in its acquisition aim for professional services organisations.”
Johnny Ola, Vice President, Global Alliances and Business Development at FinancialForce says that Appirio’s strategy “has many synergies with FinancialForce”, making it an ideal global partner “to offer customer-centric solutions to the market”.
“With the prevalence of everything-as-a-service business models, we’re confident we will continue to offer a global, industry-leading solution to enable customer success. We’re excited to drive further growth and success with this partnership.”
Tech commentator Ben Kepes says the move makes a lot of sense.
“Appirio was built in the shadow of Salesforce and specializes in helping large enterprises in their journey to the cloud,” he says.
“Initially, that was pretty Salesforce-centric, but in recent years has branched out into other cloud-based solutions. Appirio itself was acquired by massive services company Wipro a few years ago.”
“FinancialForce is growing, but perhaps not quite at the rapid clip that its investors (which, confusingly enough, includes Salesforce) would like.”
“The partnership, officially termed a Global Systems Integrator one, should help FinancialForce, in particular in its acquisition aim for professional services organisations. Appirio has historical skills in the PSA space (it built the tool that would eventually become FinancialForce PSA after all), [and] FinancialForce is a specialist in building tools for the space and the Salesforce connection is obviously a compelling joint story.”
