Buzzword buster

Breaking down some of the industry jargon

This page aims to give you further information and explanation for key terms used on the FinancialForce.com website.

If you would like further clarification – or if there are any other terms that you would like to see added to this page – please contact us.

On-premise

CODA accounting applications have led the on-premise market for over 30 years. By “on-premise”, we mean that the customer buys and owns (in some cases we will rent out) the software licenses and then either hosts the application themselves behind their own firewall, or pays a third party to host it for them. Either way, all the customer’s financial information is kept on a dedicated server. This is the traditional way of selling and deploying software licenses.

Over 2,600 customers use CODA on-premise applications, these include customers across both the public and commercial sectors such as: IKEA, Next, Caterpillar, Endemol, HSBC, OGC Buying Solutions, Icelandair & Michael Page.

Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) develops and sells CRM (Customer Relationship Management) applications, using the on-demand delivery model (aka "Cloud Computing", “Software as a service” or “SaaS”). The company has been extremely successful and, after 10 years in operation, has around 60,000 customers and over 1 million users. Salesforce.com encourages other software vendors to build or integrate their applications with the Salesforce CRM and sell them to salesforce.com customers. At the end of 2007, salesforce.com announced the launch of Force.com, a dedicated "Cloud Computing" platform on which other software vendors could build applications, which salesforce.com would host for them. At the same time, CODA announced that it would build the first enterprise-level application on the Force.com platform.

Software as a Service (SaaS), "Cloud Computing" or "on-demand" applications.

These are all increasingly common phrases used to describe a business application delivery model, where a vendor (such as CODA or salesforce.com) develops a web-native application and hosts and operates (either independently or through a third-party) the application for use by its customers over the Web. Customers do not pay for owning the application itself but rather for using it – a type of rental model, based on the number of users. In the case of FinancialForce applications, we develop the application (drawing upon 30 years’ of CODA finance systems expertise) and salesforce.com is hosting it on its platform (called Force.com). Advantages of this model are that there is no need for additional computer hardware or specialist resource, and all upgrades and implementations are managed by the service provider (FinancialForce.com). The on-demand model is particularly attractive to companies that need flexible functionality, such as fast-growing organizations, that are starting to find their systems restrictive.