FinancialForce Blends PSA, Talent Management

FinancialForce, which develops PSA and other platforms for Salesforce.com, also is pushing deeper into talent management software. The effort, called Peoplecasting, involves software that helps IT services providers to forecast, hire, empower and retain their people, the company claims.

FinancialForce's Peoplecasting push is on full display at this week's Salesforce DreamForce 2016 conference in San Francisco. The company is essentially blurring the lines between PSA, financial management and HCM (human capital management) software -- while also tapping into the Salesforce CRM cloud.

With all the data housed in the same platform, "organizations can quickly connect the dots between what's in the sales pipeline, who they need to hire and when to hire them," FinancialForce claims. Similarly, an IT service provider's executive team gains "immediate context for approving hires and overall forecasting."

True believers in the Peoplecasting strategy include Concept Services (a lead generation service provider) and Summa Technologies (a digital solutions consultancy). Concept Services, which is growing 40 percent annually, embraced FinancialForce to integrate CRM, Projects, Human Resources and Accounting into one platform.

PSA Goes Way Beyond Professional Services Automation

FinancialForce isn't entirely unique. Plenty of PSA platforms offer CRM, accounting and/or other capabilities. Within the SMB portion of the IT services market, players like Atera, Autotask, ConnectWise and Kaseya now own PSA platforms and sister RMM (remote monitoring and management) platforms. Check in with each vendor for a better understanding on their integration strategies, which vary greatly from company to company.

Meanwhile, FinancialForce appears to be gaining momentum in the midmarket, at least in part because the platform is built atop Salesforce.com. The company typically competes against names like NetSuite OpenAir and in some cases ServiceNow.