FinancialForce.com Climbs Up The ERP Market

Enterprise Resource planning (ERP) is rapidly making its way towards being an essential for modern-day businesses. With the help of complex business solutions and integrated management applications, ERP is the most recognized concept of the year 2013.

In the recent days some major developments have been seen in ERP. FinancialForce.com was an already influential actor of this industry. However, the latest acquisition has created more room for the company to strengthen its grip. Although it was announced a couple of weeks back, FinancialForce.com has now officially declared the acquisition of Vana Workforce. The acquisition can also be witnessed on the official webpage of the sold out company.

Vana Workforce is a US-based service vendor, specializing in Supply Chain Management and Human Capital Management. Its Core HRMS, Recruitment, and Talent Management products add a new dimension and operational area to FinancialForce.com

FinancialForce.com is a subsidiary of SalesForce.com and provides business applications for Force.com, a platform of SalesForce.com. It has just made its move towards another functional area (HR).

This is not the first time FinancialForce.com is making an acquisition. Three years back, in 2010, it purchased Professional Services Enterprise (PSE) from Appirio, renaming it as Professional Services Automation (PSA).

After this acquisition, the company has now accumulated an interesting portfolio of services and applications. Having a core of Financial Management operations, inheriting CRM and Supply Chain Management features from its parent Salesforce.com, acquiring Professional Services Support from Appirio, and now augmenting with HR functions from the new acquisition, FinancialForce.com seems to be on its way to full-fledge ERP solutions provider.

Besides such significant developments, FinancialForce.com is still trailed by NetSuite. As being reported, NetSuite is the most dominant in competition, when it comes to small and medium businesses. Equipped with heavyweight tools like Financial Management, Supply Chain and Inventory Management, Shipping and Fulfillment, Revenue Recognition Management, Financial Planning, Human Capital Management, Recurring Revenue Management, and Financial Analytics and reporting, NetSuite claims itself to be world’s number one cloud ERP solution.

The rivalry does not end here, as there are many others in the queue. SAP’s stumbling cloud product Business ByDesign has started showing a gradual advancement, and is expected to join the race in near future. On the other hand Intacct is fulfilling its own niche of companies and retaining its mark.

FinancialForce.com claims an edge over the rest, by having the same data structure, code bases and customization model for all its applications. This is because all its applications are hosted by a single and native platform Force.com.

Salesforce.com has been working and investing on its own platform, for a long time. The reason is that the company realizes the significance of application suite built on a single platform over those created on different solutions. Efforts for the platform have positively fulfilled the doctrines of Salesforce.com, making it able to deeply integrate its solutions.

Through such strategic acquisitions, FinancialForce.com is compelling a chunk of prospective market with complex business structures that are looking for a highly integrated solution existing on a sole platform.