digibyte - FinancialForce Community Live day 1 keynote, a quick hit with Holger Mueller
- Summary:
- Holger Mueller and Den Howlett offer a quick overview of the opening day keynote at FinancialForce Community Live 2017. Key points cover tone, ADP partnership and revrec.
A few hours ago, Holger Mueller and I ran an experiment in media by recording a Hangout on Air covering his initial thoughts on the FinancialForce Community Live opening day keynote.
The idea is to get an immediate response that serves as a jump off point for further analysis as the on the ground diginomica team of Jon Reed, Phil Wainewright, Brian Sommer and Denis Pombriant head out to their various breakout and analyst sessions.
I attended part of the livestream and immediately noticed that Fred Studer, recently minted CMO used the opportunity to inject a level of jocularity into a keynote that had the potential to run flat rather than be energetic.
This was the first customer event run under Todd Nielsen's leadership at FinancialForce and it was apparent that the copmany's marketing team had decided to take a low risk approach to this event by restricting the opening keynote to vendor talking points rather than including customers on stage. That is a disappointment for me but then I know Jon Reed has a full on set of sessions dedicated to that element which will be laser focused on value achieved.
The main highlights I saw emerging were the announcement of a partnership with ADP for payroll, an important addition in the context of FinancialForce emphasizing its commitment to professional services organizations. My POV is that FinancialForce is making the right decision because for its customers, payroll, while critical, adds little direct value. Holger doesn't agree and that's OK.
The other main talking point for me is around improvements to revrec (revenue recognition or revwreck in some cases) and a favorite talking point for Brian Sommer. It appears the company is making significant advance in this area which, in turn, got me to think about the comparison between FinancialForce and NetSuite, which also plays in the same vertical space and which increasingly bumps into each other in deals.
Overall, Mueller rated the keynote as a relatively steady performance with a new CEO doubling down on the company's commitment to customers but not seeking to blow them away with outlandish or 'out there' functionality. This is financials after all, albeit with an increasing emphasis on HR, its natural companion.
Endnote: Holger attends many of the same conferences to which the diginomica team is invited and then plenty more that he chooses to attend but that we avoid for one reason or another. We are both interested in experimenting with media approaches that provide different ways of understanding what's happening, close to real time. Hangouts provides that opportunity while posts like this allow us to offer a different way to consume that same content close to the point where the event content arose.
Bonus points: Here is Holger Mueller's Storify that provides further context to this event.