Financial Application Market Catching Cloud Fever

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Add financial applications to the growing list of in-demand enterprise software using a cloud delivery model.

More businesses are turning to cloud-based financial apps to keep track of every cent and transaction, according to a new survey from Gartner. More than a third (36 percent) of the 439 senior financial executives polled by the research group said they planned to use the cloud to power “more than half of their transactional systems of record.”

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Increasingly, business executives are looking beyond their own data centers to fill their financial management software needs.

“We have found that most clients asking about these financial business application markets are solely interested in the cloud option,” said Gartner research vice John Van Decker in a statement. “Many enterprises that currently run on-premises solutions want to move to newer solutions that put more control in the hands of the end user, and reduce the effort required when compared with on-premises upgrades.”

A whopping 93 percent of businesses expect the cloud to handle half of all future enterprise transactions, added Van Decker. Responding to these winds of change, financial software makers have already begun to modify their approach to the market.

“Vendors have responded with new and rearchitected platforms in the cloud, and most have de-emphasized their on-premises solutions, in favor of cloud implementations, which are more profitable for the vendors, while reducing the effort of local IT support,” added the Gartner executive.

Small businesses are likelier to put their accounting and financial management workloads on the cloud (44.6 percent) within the next three years, followed closely by large enterprises (40.4 percent). More than a third of midsize organizations (37.7 percent) plan to follow suit.

Gartner observed that chief financial officers (CFOs) typically exhibit a conservative streak when it comes to migrating their data to the cloud. Yet, over the next ten years, CFOs are poised to follow in the footsteps of their chief human resources officer and chief procurement officer colleagues, many of whom have already migrated their human capital management and procure-to-pay workloads to the cloud, respectively.

Regardless of the type of software, business demand for software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications is booming, lifting the fortunes of cloud providers.

In the second quarter of 2017, SaaS providers generated nearly $15 billion in revenue, a year-over-year increase of 31 percent, according to Synergy Research Group. Over the next three years, the analyst firm expects SaaS companies to double their revenues.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.