FinancialForce.com Announces Agreement to Purchase Appirio Professional Services Enterprise Solution
We have announced today an ‘Agreement to Purchase’ the Appirio Professional Services Enterprise solution from Appirio. This means we will acquire the solution, including its customer base, in the coming days. We are excited about this and believe it holds significance for the future of cloud platforms and Force.com.
PS Enterprise helps services organizations manage their people and projects and therefore is in the broad category of Professional Services Automation (PSA). Typical PSA functions include resource management, project management & documentation, time recording & billing, and reporting. The PSA market is less mature than the accounting software market and is currently enjoying high growth rates.
Importantly, PS Enterprise, especially in combination with Certinia Accounting and Salesforce, differs from typical PSA solutions in two significant ways. First, PS Enterprise enables services organizations to manage not only their people and their projects but also their customers and their financials. Second, PS Enterprise is built 100% on the same enterprise cloud platform as Salesforce CRM and Certinia Accounting. This means that PS Enterprise offers services organizations a solution that they can use to run the majority of their core operations, which is a much broader market than traditional PSA.
Appirio’s PS Enterprise is an on-demand solution that helps professional services teams manage their people, projects, customers and transactions. PS Enterprise is not another siloed PSA (Professional Services Automation) application-it supports a services business end-to-end, bridging the gap between how you sell projects and how you deliver them. As such it is well suited to services organizations of all sizes, especially those that are already using Salesforce CRM. Being an apps development specialist, we will apply our deep domain expertise to further develop and take to market the PS Enterprise solution. Services companies will be able to choose to run all or key parts of their business (people, projects, customers and financials) on a single cloud platform – the world’s leading enterprise cloud platform – Force.com. PS Enterprise customers can take advantage of Certinia Billing, in particular, to ensure a seamless and rapid payment and collections process, improving cash flow. And our customers will benefit from the extended footprint available to them on the same platform and from the same vendor. Certinia.com will of course continue to focus on delivering world class accounting applications on Force.com.
More generally, we believe strongly that this acquisition emphasizes the importance of cloud platforms in general and the growing pre-eminence of Force.com in particular.
