FinancialForce Upgrades Cloud PSA for Salesforce CRM -

FinancialForce has upgraded its popular PSA (professional services automation) platform for Salesforce's CRM cloud but stopped short of specifically positioning the SaaS offering for MSPs (managed services providers). But CEO Tod Nielsen says a partner push is coming.

The new FinancialForce PSA, which surfaced at this week's Community Live conference, now features:

Baseline and version control, which allows customers to track and better manage change across the life of a project.
Risk management capabilities to mitigate issues that can hinder a project.
Business intelligence to identify whether a project will arrive over or under budget.
A Salesforce Lightning user experience, including the Kanban view and personalization.

At first glance, FinancialForce doesn't attempt to compete head-in against MSP- and technology solution provider-centric PSA platforms like Autotask and ConnectWise Automate. But take a closer look and you'll notice some rather impressive names embracing FinancialForce PSA. True believers include AHEAD (a major IT service provider in Chicago), Venture Technologies (a Cisco, EMC and VMware partner) and OAC Services (a Salesforce partner).

FinancialForce Business Expansion

FinancialForce has been in expansion mode. The company earlier this year hired Tod Nielsen as its president and CEO, succeeding founder Jeremy Roche. Also, NetSuite veteran Fred Studer arrived as chief marketing officer (CMO) around the same time. Nielsen has been positioning FinancialForce as a cloud ERP vendor, somewhat akin to Oracle’s NetSuite and Microsoft’s Dynamics 365.

Nielsen, a Salesforce, VMware, Microsoft and Heroku veteran, joined FinancialForce amid strong growth for the company. Indeed, FinancialForce grew more than 40 percent in 2016, and was rapidly approaching the $100 million annual revenue run rate milestone in early 2017, the company said at the time.

So what's next? A major partner push, Nielsen said at this week's conference, according to Diginomica:

"Success is a team sport. We’ve got to go in with our partners and make this happen. I think today we’ve got forty partners. I’ll be disappointed if we don’t have hundreds of partners at this time next year, as far as people that are adding value and driving it."

Hmmm... Is an MSP partner push on the way?