SAN MATEO, CA--(Marketwire - April 8, 2010) -
- Innovative new business tool for proactive collaboration, developed using the new social capabilities of the Force.com platform
- Unveiled today at Cloudforce2 in New York
- Among first social enterprise apps available on the ChatterExchange, now live on AppExchange 2
FinancialForce.com, the global leader in online cloud accounting solutions built natively on the Force.com platform from salesforce.com, today announced it has launched Chatterbox, a new app on salesforce.com's ChatterExchange, helping to accelerate the market shift to Cloud 2, the next cloud computing paradigm.
Chatterbox is a powerful new Salesforce Chatter-enabled business collaboration application using the new social capabilities of Force.com. The speed of business change, combined with reliance on haphazard technologies like email, is preventing increasingly virtual companies from being agile. Chatterbox is the first collaboration tool of its kind that alerts staff proactively about changes in the business so they can collaborate and react to solve problems, improve processes and drive competitiveness. It is among the first apps to leverage the social components of Chatter now available in the Force.com platform.
Chatterbox monitors activities on Force.com against a set of rules defined by the user. When a rule is triggered, the users linked to that rule are notified and a Salesforce Chatter stream is started. Chatterbox searches constantly for events that trigger those alerts and encourages collaboration in response to a situation.
Business situations could include the following:
- When an outstanding credit on a customer account goes over 90 days -- finance and sales professionals linked to that account can be immediately alerted, then they can quickly identify the reasons for non-payment and act to try and solve the problem to help cash flow and prevent further sales to that client being held up.
- When a specific supplier has been paid or a new supplier engaged -- to help procurement and marketing departments better manage their suppliers and improve relationships.
- Customer accounts that show no activity for a specified length of time -- may indicate service deficiencies and help ensure customers are contacted regularly.
- New sales over a specific size or won against a key competitor -- to keep management and marketing abreast of sales trends.
With Chatterbox, users from anywhere in the business can monitor important business data in real-time. This detail and the resulting conversations that are kicked off by Salesforce Chatter are captured and recorded by the system for audit purposes and historical analysis. Using Chatter, organizations can avoid the inevitable email issues such as time lapses and unstructured communication. Users can communicate with all the people from across departments that are relevant to the discussion and can see at a glance what has happened so far, who is involved and what actions are being taken at that moment.
Salesforce Chatter provides a rich suite of social collaboration components including profiles, status updates and real-time feeds that developers and partners are now using to build new social enterprise apps. The ChatterExchange, a new category on AppExchange 2, provides a single location for customers to try and buy these new solutions that can extend the benefits of cloud computing and social-enabled business applications throughout the enterprise. The new ChatterExchange can be found at www.appexchange.com/chatter.
"With Chatterbox, FinancialForce.com has really considered the business value that social collaboration can deliver for enterprise customers," said George Hu, executive vice president, marketing and alliances at salesforce.com. "Real-time collaboration using social enterprise tools like Salesforce Chatter and FinancialForce.com's Chatterbox will break down traditional communication barriers and overcome the problems associated with email or legacy on-premise collaboration software."
Chatterbox works with salesforce.com applications, FinancialForce.com applications and any custom objects or ISV products running on the Force.com platform. The application provides anytime, anywhere access to real-time feeds via Blackberry or iPhone mobile devices, so users can be updated and respond as business issues arise.
"Agile firms win, and the costs of losing a deal or a customer are too high to risk these days," said Jeremy Roche, president and CEO of FinancialForce.com. "Companies have fewer decision makers than ever and are dealing with huge change, so they need to be proactive if they want to really learn about what's going on in their business. Traditional communication tools like email or phone are flawed when you need many people to collaborate. They respond at different speeds or communicate one-to-one, so everyone is at different stages in a conversation. Chatterbox, in collaboration with Salesforce Chatter, solves that and has the potential to tear down the walls between front and back office and those between departments. It enables companies to proactively monitor business activity and focuses the company around solving the big problems: improving customer service, delivering better products, driving down costs and increasing the bottom line. This is a new kind of business collaboration we've never seen before."
Availability:
The Chatterbox beta will be available to registrants via the new ChatterExchange, a brand new category for social enterprise apps that is now part of AppExchange 2.
For more information and video demonstrations please visit:
http://www.financialforce.com/chatterbox
FinancialForce.com recent announcements:
http://www.financialforce.com/accounting-news-events/news
About the Force.com Platform and AppExchange
Force.com is the only proven enterprise platform for building and running business applications in the cloud. The Force.com platform powers the Salesforce CRM (http://www.salesforce.com/) applications with more than 800 ISV partner applications like those from FinancialForce.com and Fujitsu, and nearly 150,000 custom applications used by salesforce.com's 72,500 customers such as Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE and Sprint Nextel. Force.com now enables developers to make any enterprise app social by leveraging the social collaboration components including profiles, status updates and real-time feeds available with Chatter.
Applications built on the Force.com platform can be easily distributed to the entire cloud computing community through the salesforce.com AppExchange 2 marketplace http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/, now featuring the ChatterExchange.
About FinancialForce.com
FinancialForce.com is a unique online cloud accounting solution -- the only one to be built natively on the Force.com platform from salesforce.com. It allows finance teams of organizations using Salesforce CRM -- the world's most successful online solution -- to truly 'Speak Salesforce' in a way no other cloud accounting system can do, dramatically simplifying processes like invoicing, collecting cash and servicing customers.
As the only financial management solution that 'Speaks Salesforce,' FinancialForce.com does for finance what salesforce.com has done for CRM -- it gives organizations a complete understanding of their financial and business performance that is 100% up-to-the-minute and accurate.
FinancialForce Accounting's unique real-time design is always in balance and up to date, delivering the confidence of reliable figures from secure systems, looked after by the world's most trusted enterprise cloud computing platform. It is aimed at organizations outgrowing their original accounting applications and looking for a simple yet powerful accounting solution with the capability to support them as they expand locally and even internationally.
FinancialForce.com was funded with an investment from UNIT4 (parent company of accounting software specialist CODA) and salesforce.com. It combines CODA's 30 years of designing and building financial applications, with the salesforce.com platform's decade of dependability, availability and security.
The result is a range of cloud computing applications, including FinancialForce Accounting -- a full Software as a Service (SaaS) accounting application -- delivered on a subscription basis; the first international SaaS accounting system developed on salesforce.com's cloud computing platform, Force.com.
Contact Information:
For more information, please contact:
Nicole Wasowski
LEWIS PR for FinancialForce.com
415-992-4400