Telegraph continues cloud bound strategy

Telegraph Media GroupCIO Paul Cheesbrough continues his cloud based strategy at the quality newspaper publisher with a new deal that will see parts of its accounting go into the cloud.

Telegraph Media Group has selected FinancialForce.com, a cloud based accounting service, for its media sales department to automate the accounting and invoicing of the department. All invoices will be created by FinancialForce.com and accounting entries will automatically move into the Agresso Business World enterprise resource planning (ERP) system the newspaper group uses. Cheesbrough also hopes to integrate the accounts more closely with the media sales department’s Salesforce.com CRM system it uses.

Read the CIO UK interview with Paul Cheesbrough here

In a statement Cheesbrough said: “We expect to gain significant process improvements from creating this linkage, and more importantly, we’re seeking to provide our clients with increased levels of service”.

In 2008 Cheesbroughselected Google Apps in a cloud based move to phase out Microsoft Office and Exchange. Cheesbrough told CIO UK: “We’ve got Office 2003, Windows XP and Exchange 2003 and we started to look at the refresh cycle at the beginning of this year. We had a decision to make as to whether to sign up for a three-year enterprise agreement with Microsoft or look at something else. [As a pilot] we put 10 per cent of our 1400 user seat estate and allowed them to use Google Apps alongside their Office and Exchange infrastructure. Overwhelmingly, the feedback was positive and there would have been uproar if we had said we were turning it off. We were faced with the decision of whether we pursued the same [Microsoft] path and paid the price for that or put more and more internal solutions in the cloud. “