Bob Evans recently sat down with Scott Brown, CEO, Certinia, formerly known as FinancialForce. Previously, FinancialForce, founded in 2009, was heavily invested in its professional services automation (PSA) product. In the last year, the company has greatly shifted into three new markets: Services CPQ, FP&A, and Customer Success. Brown felt that the company had outgrown its name, prompting him to join Bob today to share some exciting news as the company rebrands itself as Certinia.
FinancialForce Becomes Certinia
The Big Themes:
- Purpose-built solutions centered on people: Managing resources to deliver for customers can be a challenge for companies with large services organizations. Certinia’s solutions are purpose-built, focusing on the people and the service economy business, rather than product ID, which was formerly considered to be the “center of the universe.”
- Synchronous process flows: When looking at process flows, most companies find that they have silos of automation, and the “as quoted” versus “as delivered” aspects generally are not in alignment. “By having a system that runs all the way from opportunity to renewal, we [Certinia] bring those things into alignment with each other and have the ‘as quoted’ and ‘as delivered’ very much in sync with each other,” notes Brown.
- Automation to enhance opportunity: When speaking with service economy workers, it is clear that “low-value work makes them crazy.” Automating this work enables service economy workers to do more of what they love, like being in front of customers and providing “intellectual horsepower.” Certinia applies automation as a means of optimizing the employee experience, too, and having a “great, enriched career journey.”
The Big Quote: “We are, kind of, starting a new chapter in our company’s history with the rebranding to Certinia… and everything that we’ve developed up to now has widely increased the aperture of who we are. If you look at it across the spectrum of all those different products, we now are a full end-to-end provider. And hence, Certinia is our new name. And we think it probably reflects not only the company we are today, it’s the company we aspire to be. And so working with the large customers and the mid-tier customers that we have, we listen very carefully to what they need to get certainty in their environment, how to manage the very large and complex services organizations, and ultimately to have success. So we think the rebranding is the next chapter of our history, we think it’s a really important thing to do, because it reflects the nature of who we are. But more importantly, we see big things in our future.”
