Glovia Brings Enterprise-Grade ERP to Salesforce.com Customers and the Cloud

Glovia International, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Fujitsu, is a leading provider of extended enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for engineer-to-order and high volume manufacturers. The company supports more than 1,000 manufacturing sites, operated by some of the world’s most trusted brands, with its on-premise solutions. Glovia is also a pioneer in bringing ERP to the clouds; glovia.com Order Management on Force.com is one of the first cloud-based ERP solutions.

Strategic Partnership

As software-as-a-service (SaaS) becomes mainstream, more and more software developers are moving their on premise tools and applications to the cloud. With a long history of delivering leading-edge technologies (the company was originally founded in 1970 as Xerox Computer Services), it was only natural that Glovia would want to migrate its suite of ERP solutions.

The most important initial consideration for Glovia management was the ERP adoption cycle; they wondered whether it would be fast enough to generate an acceptable return on investment. According to Randy Ehler, EVP of SaaS business for Glovia, “ERP implementations are typically very intricate and can involve a high degree of customization. Because of that complexity, ERP users are still beginning to embrace the cloud. We needed to think about how much time and energy we wanted to spend on evangelism and whether that would come at the expense of development.”

“We ultimately determined that the best initial strategy for launching a cloud-based solution was to focus on known SaaS buyers, or SaaS-friendly buyers,” he continues. “Glovia and Fujitsu, our parent company, were Salesforce CRM customers. We were familiar with salesforce.com’s leadership in software-as-a-service (SaaS) and enterprise cloud computing solutions. With more than 50,000 customers, the Salesforce CRM user base seemed to be the most efficient target for us to get share in the cloud. It followed that Force.com native solutions would be the most attractive to them.”

Technical Considerations

Before Glovia could make a final decision about its strategy, managers needed to know that the platform could deliver from a technical perspective. They had enough experience with Salesforce CRM to appreciate its ease-of-use and high service delivery standards. The next step was to look at the platform from a development point of view.

According to Ehler, “We had two main technical considerations. First, we looked at the development productivity of the platform. We needed to understand how much investment would be required to migrate our solutions. Would it make financial sense to put developers on the project? The second consideration was the robustness of the platform. Could it support complex ERP systems?”

“We spent several months evaluating the platform. We had a couple of developers work on prototypes; they took some core pieces of our ERP solutions and transformed them into Force.com native offerings. Ultimately we concluded that it had what we needed to proceed.”

Developing With Force.com

When the Glovia team's application development skills and domain expertise were combined with Force.com's high productivity, rapid development cycles resulted. “ This project moved very quickly,” says Ehler. “It was an order of magnitude faster than previous dev efforts. And the cost was about 1/10th of what it would have been if we had used .NET or J2EE.”

Because salesforce.com manages all of the infrastructure, Glovia continues to save the money and manpower it would otherwise have put toward building and managing data centers. The salesforce.com team worries about routers, servers, installations, upgrades, security, availability, and performance. The Glovia team is freed up to focus on innovation and customer success.

Development efforts were also supported by the Force.com community. The forums have proved every bit as essential to Glovia’s efforts as documentation and sample code. “We utilized the forums extensively for sharing ideas, tips, and techniques. Every time we get stuck we used them,” says Ehler. “So we were never stuck for long.”

Marketing with Salesforce.com

Glovia's first Force.com native solution launched at Dreamforce in November, 2008. The company’s initial offerings are centered around order management and fulfillment for products-based businesses. The early customers are primarily in high-tech, manufacturing, and education.

Customers are enthusiastic about Glovia's products. “We provide Salesforce CRM users with a fantastic alternative,” says Ehler. “The cost of custom development and integration for ERP solutions can be very high. We offer a comparable alternative on a much more affordable, subscription-based model.”

“Additionally, our Force.com solution has the same interface, and high level of usability, as Salesforce CRM. For Salesforce CRM users, this consistent look and feel drives higher adoption and usage, so companies can get all of the benefit out of their ERP efforts and spending. And it is automatically integrated, so there are no hidden costs, timelines, and nightmares.”

The Future Looks Cloudy

Glovia management is excited about the company’s Force.com roadmap. They intend to add functionality to support service businesses, and move into additional areas of ERP including purchasing, vendor relationships, and more. The return on investment has been so positive the company has quadrupled the size of its dedicated Force.com development team.

“Glovia has a comprehensive set of ERP solutions,” says Ehler. “Now we know that we can quickly migrate any of them to Force.com, depending on what customers need. With Force.com, we're positioned for growth in the cloud.”

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