Two key trends are converging and driving the adoption of new software tools in financial applications:
•cloud computing platform technology has matured to the point that it is now mainstream, and has fundamentally lowered the barriers to scale and made new solutions instantly horizontal and global for enterprise customers.
•the increasing “consumerization” of enterprise software.
It’s not uncommon to think of finance operations as part of the back office. Stakeholders regularly get excited about sales forecasts and revenue trends but rarely get as animated about days sales outstanding (DSO) behavior, working capital forecasts and credit risk exposures. Unlike revenue forecasts, finance reports have been inherently complex, difficult to distill and challenging to action without delving into third order details.
But new technologies are opening a new window into the world of finance, and they are coming to market at a time when margin pressures are increasing, capital markets are in deep shock and global liquidity continues to be a large concern. Forward-looking CFOs are catalyzing new ways to manage and run the business, driven off dynamic and easy-to-distill actionable views of the business. And for good measure: an organization’s ability to respond quickly and decisively is becoming fundamental to corporate performance. And agility comes from insights – insights that are too often locked up in data across multiple automation systems strung around the enterprise.
Behind this movement, two key trends are converging and driving the adoption of new software tools now becoming increasingly popular in corporations across the globe. First, cloud computing platform technology has matured to the point that it is now mainstream, and has fundamentally lowered the barriers to scale and made new solutions instantly horizontal and global for enterprise customers.
The other trend is the increasing “consumerization” of enterprise software. The ease of use and flexibility that we are accustomed to with personal consumer applications has now come through to the enterprise. The option of viewing core operational metrics in a tablet-optimized, interactive and rich multimedia application with an almost-addictive user interface is fast replacing the traditional world of reviewing Excel files off a projector. These trends impact how organizations view their technology deployments.
