Data Firm Muscles Up, Hires Data-Pro CFO

For Steven Love, the opportunity to become the first CFO at Evolv, a four-year-old Silicon Valley start-up, was something like love at first sight.Evolv is a data company. It merges information from its clients’ human-resources systems, Evolv’s own database and publicly available sources into a c...

By David McCann • Sept. 30, 2013

SEC Will Keep Its Doors Open (For Now)

Editor’s note: The SEC released a statement Monday afternoon specifying that it will be able to stay open for “a few weeks” during a government shutdown.Unless the United States Congress can agree on a budget before the end-of-day Monday, a long list of government agencies will shut down almost e...

By Marielle Segarra • Sept. 30, 2013

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Top 5 stories from CFO.com

From CPA licensure changes to undergoing a digital transformation, these are the most popular stories CFOs are reading. 

By CFO.com staff

Private Company Sales Growth Tumbles

Privately held company sales are growing at an annual rate of 3.8 percent in 2013, according to preliminary estimates from financial-information company Sageworks. That’s a steep drop from an increase of 9.4 percent in 2012 and 9.9 percent in 2011. Sageworks analyst Libby Bierman says sales growt...

By Marielle Segarra • Sept. 25, 2013

Don’t Forget Small Business in Tax Reform

Congress and President Obama are once again talking about corporate tax reform. And once again small businesses are saying: “Don’t forget about us.”As part of his goal to get the U.S. economy moving, the president introduced a plan in July that included a proposal to lower the income tax rate on ...

By Douglas S. Stransky • Sept. 25, 2013

Evaluating third-party application managers

Increasingly sophisticated and complicated business applications are pushing chief financial officers to consider outsourcing their application management, according to experts. In deciding whether to outsource application management, CFOs should evaluate potential managers in four basic areas, s...

By A CFO Interview • Sept. 23, 2013

When CFOs consider closing their data centers

As cloud computing solutions become more accepted, more chief financial officers are weighing whether their companies should retain any on-premises data center services. When considering whether to remain in the data center business, the first steps for a CFO should be understanding what assets t...

By A CFO Interview • Sept. 23, 2013

Cloud giving CFOs something to think about

Cloud computing solutions have introduced another element for chief financial officers to consider when evaluating a potential application management outsourcing arrangement. That’s because applications that reside on the cloud can be less expensive and can be managed remotely, said Peter Marston...

By A CFO Interview • Sept. 17, 2013

Getting your new ERP implementation off on the right foot

The decision to embark on a new ERP implementation is one that chief financial officers don’t take lightly. While the implementation will undoubtedly be painful, CFOs can get their ERP projects off on the right foot by following a few basic guidelines, experts say. Enterprise resource planning, o...

By A CFO Interview • Sept. 17, 2013

Purchase Price Allocation to Goodwill Drops

How much of the purchase price of a transaction acquirers allocate to goodwill and intangible assets is more than just an academic question. Before or soon after a deal is completed, it’s key that CFOs know how the amortization of intangible assets will play out in future earnings periods and whe...

By Vincent Ryan • Sept. 13, 2013

Telecom giant may be setting trend for IT contracts

One of India’s largest telecommunications companies may be signaling a new trend: Split large, general information technology consulting contracts into several contracts covering more specific services, such as application management. The company, Airtel, is looking to split up the IT duties now...

By A CFO Interview • Sept. 12, 2013

Decision time: Keep the data center or not?

The question is a common one for today’s chief financial officers: Do we keep our in-house data center or hire a third party to manage it, or outsource it entirely? Charles McLellan at ZDNet has a primer for companies considering the question. He writes about a survey from 2011 that showed data ...

By A CFO Interview • Sept. 12, 2013

Amazon and IBM wrestle for high-stakes CIA contract

As government entities expand into the cloud and require more related services, a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims sheds light on some of the issues involved, as two technology titans battle for a high-profile contract. The Washington Post reports that Amazon Web Services filed the la...

By A CFO Interview • Sept. 5, 2013

Ten reasons to outsource your data center

Why outsource your data center operations? An executive from Colliers International Technology Solutions Group answers the question, David Letterman style. The top 10 list of benefits of outsourcing your data center, according to Tim Huffman: • No. 10: Ecosystem—In a mixed-tenancy data center, a...

By A CFO Interview • Sept. 3, 2013

One CFO’s advice: seek agnostic application managers

When a software vendor offers you managed application services as an add-on service, be careful, says Steve Barnette, chief financial officer of an Atlanta area school district. You may be making a deal with the Devil. Barnette serves as CFO for the Paulding County school district, which covers ...

By A CFO Interview • Sept. 3, 2013

Data center outsourcing growing at a healthy clip

TechNavio has come out with a report on data center outsourcing that forecasts the market will grow 5 percent annually through 2016. A key factor in the growth the market is the difficulty in managing increasingly complex network infrastructure, TechNavio reports. Also, according to the report: ...

By A CFO Interview • Aug. 30, 2013

Rivalry growing for application management services

International Data Corporation has come out with a new report on the application management services market. The global market for application management services sold discretely, as opposed to application management bundled with data center outsourcing, reached nearly $50 billion in 2012, IDC re...

By A CFO Interview • Aug. 28, 2013

Corporates Not Yet Ready for Internal-Controls Prime Time

Most companies aren’t ready yet to comply with the new framework for internal controls put out by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) in May, according to participants in an accounting webcast aired today. But companies should be ready to comply by the end ...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Aug. 20, 2013

Struggling Bank Seeks Return to Normal

In just this one week, Anchor BanCorp entered bankruptcy, had its former CFO accused of financial-reporting fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission and disclosed weak second-quarter earnings. It wasn’t a banner week for the Wisconsin-based company, but it’s hoping to once and for all clea...

By Vincent Ryan • Aug. 16, 2013

Ambiguous requirements means a massive IT contract must be scrapped

According to InfoWorld, the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry had contracted with IBM in 2006 to help build a modernized unemployment compensation system for $106.9 million. But by 2011, the project had significant cost overruns, and by August the cost had risen to nearly $170 mil...

By Keith Button • Aug. 15, 2013

Enterprise IT and big data on the agenda for Oracle’s annual mega event

Sessions on the “executive solution sessions” agenda for the convention include: Outside, In: Transforming Enterprise IT, by Dan Hushon, chief technology officer for CSC, about how to exploit industry innovation and transform business to reflect new consumerized strategiesThe Best Platform for...

By Keith Button • Aug. 12, 2013

Small-Biz Reporting Framework Should Help Lenders

A new financial reporting framework for privately held firms should help lenders just as much as the small businesses that are using it. The American Institute of CPAs’ (AICPA) Financial Reporting Framework for small and medium size entities (SMEs), which was issued in June, allows for parent-com...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Aug. 12, 2013

Dark Skies Threaten Capital-Investment Returns

A potential change in tax rules governing the depreciation of physical assets would not generate the additional corporate tax revenue the move would be designed to stimulate, according to a report from the Tax Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.In fact, the report claims, the change ...

By David McCann • Aug. 7, 2013

How Twitter Can Avoid Facebook and Groupon’s IPO Blunders

Amid reports that Twitter is looking for a financial reporting manager, many are speculating that Twitter may go public next year. As reported in Inc., boutique advisory firm Greencrest Capital projects that the company will pull in nearly $1.1 billion in revenue in 2014. All companies face uniqu...

By Marielle Segarra • Aug. 6, 2013

IT services will get cheaper, thanks to cloud

The study of the UK market by Pierre Audoin Consultants showed that the average pay rates for most IT services skills, including application management, increased less than 1 percent to 2013 from 2012, reported TechRepublic’s Toby Wolpe. IT consulting rates increased less than 2 percent.“In ...

By Keith Button • Aug. 2, 2013

Microsoft: Cloud is one key

In an email this week to Microsoft’s 100,000 employees, Steve Ballmer, chief executive, outlined the company’s restructuring, according to ZDNet.“We have delivered many great products and had much success in market, but we all want more,” Ballmer wrote. That means “operational excellence in ...

By Keith Button • Aug. 1, 2013