Ffreedom Gets The Freedom Of Cloud Computing

Ffreedom Financial Planners was formed in March, 2009 to help customers plan their finances better. Being a startup with a minimal capital expenditure at hand, Sumeet Vaid who is the founder and CEO of the company was seeking a cost effective IT operational model. After deliberating about many technologies, Vaid opted for a cloud computing model and decided to partner with Salesforce.com for this journey.

Ffreedom chose Salesforce.com for its advantages of cost and operational flexibility. As a startup, investing heavily in IT infrastructure and support staff was not a viable option. “As of now our IT team consists of just two members and the IT infrastructure is hooked onto the cloud. The CAPEX has turned into OPEX,” said Ronak Hindocha, Chief Operations Officer (COO), Ffreedom Financial Planners.

Also, the turnaround time for any given customisation is less than two days. “We don’t have to really do the coding,” said Hindocha.

Other features like ‘Chatter’ that enables the customer’s Facebook conversations onto it is also an added advantage.

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Cloud Computing V/s On-Premise

Without the current cloud computing platform, Ffreedom would have invested heavily in the IT infrastructure where even an entry level server would have ranged between 5 - 20 lakhs.

Secondly, the massive customisation need of the company would demand a big IT team or outsourcing to a large IT firm. This would have amounted to a couple of million dollars.

“Currently we are more of an IT company, given our huge technology dependency; however, it can be managed by a two member IT team thanks to the cloud computing platform,” said Hindocha.

The company kicked off the operations with Salesforce.com’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution and slowly added other features like the financial planning engine, incentives management etc. Thus, no baggage of legacy infrastructure proved to be an advantage.

Benefits to Stakeholders

To begin with, the IT team was able to plug and play a suite of functions which otherwise involves coding work that goes behind every function added onto the platform. Salesforce.com also offers customer portal and website deployments, reporting dashboards on the platform etc. To design this from scratch is a time consuming process.

“We did not invest in servers. The Salesforce.com servers are ISO 27000 certified hence data security is a no-issue,” said Hindocha.

Clients are serviced via a Customer Service Portal where they can log in and lodge a case, access various dashboards and chat with other customers. This gives a live experience to the customer and encourages interactivity among the customer base. Moreover, the portal also facilitates filing requests on the portal, which can be addressed in no time.

All marketing activities are tracked and managed on the portal. The ROI can be tracked on a campaign-by-campaign basis and the portal can send mass mailers acting on the leads generated. “We have developed algorithms that help in lead tracking and guide in generating sales from leads,” said Hindocha. The platform can also send share quotes to clients. This is a new feature on the platform.

Another advantage of the solution was the knowledge of all the features if a proprietary model was in place. “We never thought that a real time campaign level ROI is also a possibility,” said Hindocha. The solutions are also available on the mobile.
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The Competitive Edge

The Salesforce.com offers a toolkit that crawls Facebook and Twitter conversations on the user company’s platform. ‘Chatter’ is an enterprise version of the social networking site and has virtually replaced email. Employees can solve queries in real time by posting it on Salesforce.com’s Chatter platform. IDEAS is another platform that provides opportunity for employees to share ideas related to specific functions.

Security is a No-issue

“It’s a perception,” opines Hindocha. Most CIOs are skeptical about cloud because of their large IT environment. “ISO 27001 is a globally recognised standard and we are very confident about it,” said Hindocha.

On the availability front, the company hasn’t faced a single downtime issue in the last eighteen months since they began operations. The maintenance work is also carried out over the weekend with proper intimation in advance. The upgrades are done regularly without affecting performance.

Identity Management is also handled well on the cloud platform. Every financial planner has no access to data other than his client base. “We have build hierarchies in the system,” said Hindocha.

Future Plans

Ffreedom has attained the ROI on the investment.

The customer portal is on a Beta version and will be packed with more features. The emerging importance of the social layer will be leveraged and emulated on the platform to enable more interactive features.