Darko Androcec| Cloudtweaks
The promise of platform as a service is very simple: Bring your code, and cloud vendor will handle everything else for you. Users build their applications with the vendor’s tools, APIs and supported programming languages.
Platform as a service model of cloud computing increases programmers’ productivity, reduces development costs, and enables quick release of software. One of the leading platform as a service offers is the Salesforce Platform where development is performed using salesforce.com’s web interface and a proprietary development language called Apex. The biggest benefit of the Salesforce Platform is time savings for developers, because they can easily use existing common objects, forms and workflows. Many developers use the Salesforce Platform to offer their own software as a service applications.
The end-users can explore the aforementioned applications on the Salesforce AppExchange. It is a cloud computing marketplace launched in 2005 by Salesforce. You can develop and market your applications built on the Salesforce Platform or access thousands of free and paid applications built by others. Now there are many types of applications that integrate well with Salesforce CRM, among them are back office applications. FinancialForce.com offers back office applications such as accounting, billing, and professional services automation (PSA). Their applications are native on the Salesforce Platform, with a unified user interface and single sign-on. FinancialForce.com applications are rated very highly by users on the Salesforce AppExchange.
FinancialForce Accounting is cloud accounting application that is embedded with Salesforce CRM and allows organizations to align sales, services and finance on a single cloud platform. It has a very simple design, but can support the needs of the smallest virtual organizations to the most complex multinational corporations. FinancialForce Billing’s main aim is to leverage information stored in Salesforce CRM to automatically generate invoices. The invoice entries can be exported to your ERP system of choice. FinancialForce Professional Services Automation (PSA) enables organizations to manage people, customers, projects and financials in one integrated application. It also has benefits of native integration with Salesforce CRM and the scalability and flexibility of cloud platform.
FinancialForce.com applications break down the walls between the front and back office to help teams better service customers at every touch point while effectively managing a company’s finance and productivity. A connected front and back office in the cloud can be the key to superior customer service, more repeat sales and faster cash collections. All the data are stored on one system and only one record exists for all accounts. There are no departmental silos—everyone from sales to accounting know the real-tie status of each customer.
You can find out more about their solutions at the next Dreamforce where FinancialForce.com will lead the Back Office theme. It is the company’s vision and promise to unlock back office information and put it in the hands of customer facing employees to strengthen customer relationships.
