Telegraph Media Group (TMG) has rolled out a software-as-a-service finance and accounting application for use in its media sales department.
The application in question – FinancialForce.com – was built by UK accounting software provider CODA on top of SaaS pioneer Salesforce.com’s application platform.
It will support the department’s invoicing and accounting processes, integrating with the Group’s on premise enterprise resource planning (ERP) application. TMG uses ERP software from Unit 4 Agresso, CODA’s parent company.
The Telegraph Media Group’s CIO Paul Cheesbrough has been a vocal advocate of software as a service and cloud computing, and the company already uses Salesforce.com’s CRM package and Google’s online productivity applications.
“Plug in to powerful platforms, functionality and systems that exist already on the Internet,” he wrote in 2008, “and you can do things more creatively, more quickly and cost effectively.”
Another high-profile SaaS adopter in the UK has been the Guardian Media Group which moved 2,300 staff onto Google Apps in 2009. Speaking to Information Age in November 2009, Amazon Web Services’ chief technology officer Werner Vogels said that media companies are well suited to cloud computing deployments as the uncertainty in the industry is forcing them to try innovative new business models. The ability to deploy enterprise-scale systems without long-term infrastructure commitments helps them to do this, he argued.
