 Hey everyone, welcome to this special cube conversation. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm pleased to be joined by the CEO of Financial Force, Scott Brown. Scott, it's great to have you in studio. How are you? It's great to be here. Isn't it? Yeah, thanks for having me on theCUBE. You guys have some amazing news. So, I'm on the edge of my seat here. Break it down, what's going on? Well, we're excited to announce that Financial Force has a new name and it's Certinia. Love that. So, talk a little bit about what the name means. A lot of evolution of products and services well beyond the roots of ERP. 1,400 plus customers now in 30 plus countries. A lot of folks know new Financial Force as a cloud ERP company. So how does Certinia define itself today? Is it an ERP company, PSA, FPNA, D, all of the above? What's that definition now with Certinia? That's such a good question because this actually was the driving force behind the name change that we've made and the rebranding that we've done. So the company was founded in 2009 and it was founded as a financial platform on force.com. So Financial Force was the perfect name, right? Just ideal for what we were back then. But over the years we've invested really heavily in developing the leading platform in professional services automation, PSA, right? And recently we've entered three additional new markets. We've entered services, CPQ. We've entered the FPNA market and we've entered the customer success market. So now we have this platform for services, businesses and it's amazing, right? But the company that we were when we actually founded and came up with Financial Force today less than a third of our revenues in financials were really a platform today for services, businesses. So Certinia is really the beginning of both rebranding for who we are today but also opening the aperture for the company we want to be in the future. So natural evolution as the companies evolve since 2009. The name Certinia. Talk a little bit about what that means. The roots are with certainty, which we all need these days but give us a little bit of a backstory on the decisioning behind the name. Yeah. So rebranding is a big effort as you and I were chatting about and at its core what we wanted to look at is what is it that our customers look for us to provide with our technology and solutions every day? And more than anything it's certainty, right? Our systems allow companies, multi-billion dollar companies with tens of thousands of consultants to run their business. They have to know that system of record works flawlessly. They have to know they can deliver great customer experiences for their customers. They have to predict revenue and margin and all these things have to have great levels of certainty. So when we looked at rebranding the company Certinia was the perfect name because it really spoke to what our customers look for when they use our solutions. Certainty especially in today's market is we look for it everywhere in our business lives and our personal lives but also consumers, customers in every industry have expectations that what they're going to be delivered experience wise is certain. It's personalized, it's relevant and it's now. Talk a little bit about the customer experience, the employee experience. I always think they're like this, they are inextricably length. So being able to deliver an outstanding employee experience has natural benefits to the customer base. It does, it does. And especially for services businesses, right? Because services businesses are people businesses. Like about HPE, you're all alma mater. That's a big customer of ours. So they have thousands and thousands of consultants that go out and deliver a customer experience for their customers each and every day. They use our system to run that entire business, right? They want to deliver an incredible experience for their customers so they can utilize that technology to benefit the experience that they have at their end user level. So when you think about it, those employees, we have to think about them as people, not products, right? A lot of the solutions that are built in the IT world were built in the old 30 year old MRP, ERP. The center of the universe was a product or a pit. The center of our universe is a person and people have skills, they have career aspirations, they have desires of what they want to do professionally. They have availability. All those things together represent that employee experience that you were talking about. And if we can get it right for them, then they can create a great customer experience out in the marketplace for their customers just like HPE does with our solution every day. Right, which these days is table stakes. It's like we always say access to real time data is no longer nice to have. It's absolutely essential for every industry because we as people expect a great experience that's going to deliver exactly what I'm looking for. I want you to know me in a non-creepy way, but also in terms of like businesses being able to be successful and survive long term, that employee experience has to be able to deliver because employees need to be, they need to be enabled. They need to have data at their fingertips to help make the right decisions so that the customers then really feel valued and trust a company like Sartania. Yeah, and at the end of the day managing services businesses, it's complex. It's hard to do, right? We have customers like Siemens. We have people, you know, Avalara, like Elastic. They're all trying to deliver a great experience in implementing their technology and their customers. The services that they surround this with extremely difficult to deliver and to do it in a profitable way, a predictable way to have a great experience for their end user customers. It's hard, right? So technology like ours, it's purpose built around people and helping them to deliver those projects to their customers. It's just, it's critical, right, to their success. I like that it's people-centric. I think oftentimes we can lose sight of that and we think of machines, especially with what's going on with AI and generative AI right now that's taking over the world. It's really important to enable the people to be able to help facilitate those experiences. Give me some examples that you mentioned, you know, running a services business is challenging. Whether that is a big company like an HPE that has services businesses within it or a company that is all services. Talk about some of the things that they come to Sartinia looking to help eliminate on the challenges side and what it is that you're able to help them just erase from their challenges. Yeah, most of these folks, they kind of grow organically or over time with custom systems and spreadsheets and they manage to put it all together but it's not an efficient way to, you know, resource manage the thousands of resources that you might have. So they usually reach a point where they say, I can't continue to do business the way I have before. My resource utilization is low, my margin is low, my project delivery is off, my customer MPS is low. Anytime you have those kind of factors then they come to us and they say, can you help us to deliver those outcomes? We want better profitability, better resource utilization, better project management and ultimately as we talked about a better experience of the customer. So they kind of hit a point where they break, right? And that's when they generally come to us and say, we need a world-class professional services automation system to manage this very complex environment well. And who is, who's coming to certificate? In terms of the personas, is this at the C level? In terms of, I mean, you talked about outcomes and it's really all about enabling business outcomes, you know, from opportunity to renewal and everything in between. Who is it that comes to you most? Where are the majority of your customer conversations these days? Yeah, you know, I would say in the past they were more on the technical side of the business today. It's completely with the business decision makers. In fact, it's almost always driven by the CEO, COO, Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Customer Officer. Those are the folks that we're talking to all the time. And they're looking at and saying, for us to deliver, we actually need to create great digital transformation in this particular area. A lot of them have already invested in CRM and ERP and some of these supporting areas. They've done nothing around the services area. This is one of the most untouched, unvended parts of the IT stack. Services is sort of the unloved child. You know, they just don't get the investment and help that they need. People are waking up to that and realizing there's a huge opportunity to improve the performance of the business as well as the experience for the customer. So it's a C level conversation today across the board. The services also can drive a lot of commerce, a lot of that for every type of company. So is that why you're seeing it raise up to, this is no longer a technical discussion, this is a business imperative. Right. You know, if you look at companies that are out there like HPE, like Stevens, et cetera, you think, oh, they provide software, they provide servers, they provide all these different products, but how do they get them in the hands of their customer and make them successful at services, right? And increasingly, if you look at it, the amount of growth in each of these businesses that's happening in services is way in excess of what's happening in product. So it's becoming a bigger and bigger part of their business and the imperative of delivering that well has become even more important to them as time has gone on. Speaking of delivering it well, you talked about the evolution of the company back in 2009, the expertise that you've had in Cloud ERP that's extending the expertise in PSA and MP&A. What's the new value proper, the competitive differentiator of CERTINIA that you're going to be articulated to your customer base? Well, for our customers, basically, everything from opportunity to renewal, we have now automated and made digital. And for most folks, they had a lot of issues along the way where they were trying to go to different systems and then they had to stitch them together and make them work together. Our system is built natively on Salesforce. So let's say you're a Salesforce shop, which many people are. Well, guess what? When you implement our system, there's one customer master, one inventory master, one user persona, everything that's there is connected in real time, all working on force.com, right? So for the minute I have a customer interaction, I start to quote, all the way through the delivery process, all the way to serving them from a customer success standpoint and ultimately renewing them, we can do everything, right? And then do it in real time. So if you're invested in Salesforce, be it sales cloud, be it service cloud, et cetera, this will all work together seamlessly in real time. And they never have to be an integrator. Today, the problem they have to is I've got four, five, six, seven systems and they're all API-in I've got 12 customer masters and 10 inventory masters, it's a mess. We come in and we say, here's one end-to-end process that works together. We'll automate all that for you and you never have to be the integrator, so. On the automation front, professional services automation has been challenging for a lot of organizations for a long time now. No question. Is it a cultural shift that you're also seeing in terms of, we talked about this conversation really elevating to the C-Suite and why. But I also imagine that, especially history businesses that have been around for a while, have to really get their teams on board and the culture of the organization needs to shift to be able to realize the benefits of automation. How does Certinia help on that cultural shift front? I imagine you do. Yeah, yeah, we do. In fact, the biggest single competitor that we have is no decision because we don't have the will to change the culture and to change the core systems by which we run the business. It isn't other competitive systems that are out there in the marketplace. It really comes down to a conversation about, do you have the will to change this very complex organization? I'll give you another example, Phillips, right? So Phillips, they took their entire business and pivoted it to healthcare. And along the way, they said, the only way we can deliver these healthcare machines and capabilities is to surround them with services. So they said, we're gonna build a complete services platform with us. They run on financial force, right? And this gives them the ability now to deliver their vision of being a healthcare provider. They used to be the consumer products and all these different businesses. And the services were key to that and they had to make a decision. Am I going to make this my system of record? Am I gonna drive a cultural change inside Phillips that says, that healthcare experience is gonna be surrounded with services and we're gonna power that experience for the customer. So you're absolutely spot on that the issue is a cultural issue and the issue is a will to change your system of record that supports that and both, that's the most difficult C-suite conversation. It's not the technology conversation, it's that piece. It really is and it doesn't change overnight. No. The one constant has changed, right? We know that, that's a statement we can use in any aspect of life but people get really comfortable with certain things. But businesses like we were talking about earlier in every industry can't afford to sit back and wait. To your point about a lot of, whether it's businesses that do a lot of M&A that don't do a good enough job at actual integration or shadow IT buying different pieces of software and data is in different pockets not really being able to come together to drive the outcomes, the improved revenue, the outcomes that organizations need, there's no time to wait anymore. Yeah and if you're in a services business how do you grow? The only way you grow is by adding people, right? So I was telling you it was just down in Australia, right? I met with a customer there, CyberCX. Three years ago they were at zero people. Today they have 4,500 consultants. So the leading cybersecurity consulting firm in Australia they run our system end to end. And they did 22 acquisitions in three years. Whoa. The only way they could do it was put a foundational system in like ours that allowed them to grow and to allow them to deliver that customer experience. Today, amazing, right? Growth, but they had to make that decision up front that they were gonna create an environment that allowed them to grow and they had a platform on which they could do that. Well, you know, we often hear the term and I was telling you before we went live on the marketer and so future ready. Future ready is a term that everybody uses. And they always ask, well, what does that actually mean? Because I think it can mean different things to different people. How does it become a reality? But it sounds like what you were talking about with the Australia customers, they went through massive transformation, massive M&A, but they had a platform that flexed. Probably an intelligent platform that was flexible enough and agile to give them the foundation to do that. Yeah, and very few people look ahead and say, I'm gonna prepare myself for that kind of growth. And if you do that, especially in the services business, you have an incredible growth opportunity because it's all predicated on the number of people you have or a billion in the marketplace and delivering projects for customers. So yeah, building this kind of platform gives you that growth opportunity. Without it, it's extremely difficult to scale. Wow, this sounds so exciting. I imagine you're thrilled. But last question for you, what are some of the things that you and the team are probably most excited about? This is way more than a name change. What excites you about what you're announcing today and the trajectory that you're on? Yeah, well, I kind of feel like we're just getting started. I was actually a customer for many, many more years than I've been CEO. I've been CEO of the last two and a half years. I was a customer at Teradata and I was a customer at Cisco and I saw the power of this platform for our services businesses there. That's why I was so excited to be a part of this team. The opportunities for us are amazing in terms of the things that we can do for our customers. We're just getting started. So yeah, we are in five different markets. Yeah, we can do everything, you know, opportunity renewal, watch out in the future. We have a lot of great new stuff coming. We will be watching for sure. What's the new URL gonna be? It's gonna be certinia.com. All right, excellent. Scott, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, sharing this breaking news. I cannot wait to watch. It sounds like tremendous momentum potential and really congratulations on the evolution of the business. Like you said, early innings, but we appreciate you coming here to break the news. Thank you. Well, it's great to be on theCUBE. Thank you, Lydia. All right, you heard it here on theCUBE. Financial force is now certinia.com is the new URL. Check it out. Scott articulated it as you heard some amazing customer stories. Check out the website. We so appreciate you watching for Scott Brown. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching a special CUBE conversation.