Is the marketing team at FinancialForce in fifth grade?

You’ve got to question the latest marketing strategy of FinancialForce. Their “FrankenCloud” announcement earlier this month was a confusing shot at NetSuite, Oracle, and SAP that gained a sharp rebuke from NetSuite’s CEO Zach Nelson. Let me summarize the FinancialForce marketing pitch: “multiple clouds are bad.” Thanks for that info guys. The only surprise is that the press release FinancialForce issued wasn’t written using a crayon.

Let’s look through this a bit. FinancialForce is a third-tier ERP vendor built on the Salesforce1 platform trying to gain some marketing traction. In the recent Nucleus Research Value Matrix for ERP we rate FinancialForce in the facilitator quadrant and when the company wins deals, they are almost always in Salesforce-centric environments.   NetSuite, Oracle, and SAP are top-tier ERP vendors with long histories solving enterprise problems. Nucleus rates all three companies in the leader quadrant in that same Matrix. All three top-tier companies are rapidly adding capabilities for their customers either through internal development or acquisitions. According to FinancialForce, this is bad.

I beg to differ. When one cloud company acquires another there’s a transition period while the application is integrated. That should go without saying. Customers of the top companies know the capabilities will continue to expand with the latest and best thinking, either internal or acquired. Integration will never be there on the first day but the capabilities will come. For FinancialForce customers, apparently you have a long and slow road ahead of you while the company builds its own capabilities internally. On the bright side, this past March FinancialForce announced $110 million to help drive development. Sounds good until you compare it to the money the leaders spend on development and acquisitions.

I’m not sure where the FinancialForce marketing team was going with the FrankenCloud message. Yes, multiple clouds are bad but everyone recognizes that and I’ve yet to be in a meeting with a vendor that didn’t have a long term strategy for unification for an acquisition. If the plan was to turn the FinancialForce weakness of a smaller vendor without the depth of the big players into a strength then it’s a rather juvenile effort.

At Nucleus we’re always looking to support the underdog vendor that delivers value. In the case of FinancialForce, generating questionable market confusion is a far cry from offering value for customers.