Bob Scott reporting in his weekly Insights column.
FinancialForce.com has opened an office in downtown Chicago, Ill., joining the San Francisco, Calif., company headquarters as its sites in the United States. The company expects there will be 40 employees in the new location by the end of 2015 and that it will become a major U.S. hub supporting functions from sales to marketing and consulting. The press release announcing the opening said the site would be important for supporting the customer base. The company, which received $110 million in funding in March, expects to employ 700 people by year’s end. “We look forward to settling in and deepening our roots in Chicago,” CEO Jeremy Roche said in a prepared statement. The software publisher also has offices in Harrogate and Manchester, England, Ontario, Canada; Sydney, Australia; and Granada. With its product built on the Salesforce1 platform, FinancialForce says it reached a $50 million revenue run rate this year. FinancialForce registered as a company to watch in May when it urged customers to “Beware of the Frankencloud”, which it described as a patchwork collection of disparate cloud applications and technologies. By itself, that was not the signal. What raised my attention was the fact that the press release quoted a new user who referred to NetSuite OpenAir as part of the monstrous technology. That month, NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson, whose company refers to the mixture of systems as “hairballs”, reacted from the stage of his company’s SuiteWorld conference by calling the folks at Financialforce liars more than once.