“We use Salesforce.com for our CRM solution,” he says. “We also use Marketo [for marketing solutions], we use Workday [for human resources solutions].” But the 1,600-strong company, which has data centres and operations in 11 countries including Japan and Singapore, has not signed up with any SaaS financial management provider.  

 

“Pushing our financial data out in the public environment, I don’t think we’re ready for that stage,” says Taylor. “I think there’s still some work to be done with cloud service providers and how they’re going to [handle] certain key services that are very sensitive.”

 

The U.S.-based CFO recently spoke with CFO Innovation’s Cesar Bacani. Below are excerpts of the conversation.

 

We use Salesforce.com ourselves for our CRM solution. We also use Marketo [for marketing solutions], we use Workday [for human resources solutions]. We as a company do use cloud service providers. Whether it’s SaaS, whether it’s PaaS, whether it’s IasS, we can use it as an opportunity to sell to and in some cases we might use it as an opportunity [to become] a customer of that customer.

 

None at this point. We’re using Oracle databases and that infrastructure is housed on our database servers inside our own facilities.

 

I’ll speak for myself and I don’t want to speak for all of CFOs generically. We’re in the middle of building a global single [implementation of] Oracle inside our facilities here [in the U.S.]. We’re creating a uniform mapping and chart of accounts structure on these Oracle databases so that we can have the efficiency we need on a global basis.

 

Pushing our financial data out in the public environment, I don’t think we’re ready for that stage. I think there’s still some work to be done with cloud service providers and how they’re going to provide certain key services that are very sensitive, so they need to make sure they have the security, they have the reliability, they meet the regulatory compliance requirements. I just don’t think the market is quite ready for that yet on a mainstream basis. It doesn’t mean people aren’t doing it, but we’re not ready for that.

 

Yes, they might be willing to do that. Oracle on Demand is an example of that. I’m sure SAP has a [similar] solution; so do some of the smaller providers. But what you’re seeing [smaller organisations] do is, instead of investing in hardware infrastructure, they’re willing to use other people’s processing capacity [i.e., tap infrastructure-as-a-service], which is probably a little easier for them, less costly. And so your ability to deploy a [financial management] solution is much easier using the public environment than it would be doing it privately.

 

We’re just not ready for it. One day, the market will be, but it’s not today and it’s not tomorrow. There’s some real issues around service delivery, the architecture, service level agreement, what are the costs, how do you evaluate it, can you define the business case and how do you hold the service provider accountable. We’re just not ready for that in the company.