Salesforce.com, Coda form new SaaS financials company

Unit 4 Agresso and on-demand CRM (customer relationship management) vendor Salesforce.com will announce Wednesday they are launching a new company called FinancialForce.com that will incorporate the Coda 2go on-demand financial application.

Unit 4 Agresso is the parent company of venerable financials software vendor Coda, maker of Coda 2go and a range of on-premises applications. Coda CEO Jeremy Roche will serve the same role at FinancialForce.com, and the new company's board will include members from Unit 4 Agresso, Salesforce.com and Coda.

While FinancialForce.com will technically be operated as a separate entity, it will be closely linked with Salesforce.com for marketing and sales. Salesforce.com will also be providing first-line support, as the Coda2go application is based on its Force.com development platform.

Unit 4 Agresso is the majority owner of the new entity but Roche declined to reveal the size of Salesforce.com's stake.

He touted the “seamless integration” of the two applications. “You can drop the FinancialForce.com application into a live Salesforce environment and it immediately picks up the attributes, attaches itself to the accounts. You can see your sales and financial data side-by-side,” he said.

Some Coda 2go customers have been employing the application as “accounting middleware,” using it to “pre-prepare” raw data from Salesforce.com for their back-end accounting systems, Roche said. “It's almost like a sub-ledger, producing debits and credits that can be passed off into the corporate system.”

Pricing will remain the same after the switch, starting at US$125 per user per month, Roche said. Existing Coda 2go customers should see no changes or disruptions in service, he added.

FinancialForce.com is also hoping to ramp up the number of partners building applications that employ its financials technology, he said.

The announcement may make life tougher for other SaaS financials vendors, such as Intacct, said 451 Group analyst China Martens. However, Coda 2go is less mature than competing offerings, and other players may also attempt to court larger customers, she said.

Companies might use FinancialForce.com as a step up from Excel or Quicken, and “would welcome that tight integration with CRM,” she said.

However, another potential target is enterprise who are standardized on an ERP system but might consider SaaS financials for a new division, said Altimeter Group analyst Ray Wang.