One-To-One and One-To-Many, Simultaneously
I’ve written a few times in the past about Zendesk a Danish Boston-based company that provides a nice friendly help-desk tool that is a perfect way for companies to engage customers in deep one-to-one support conversations – the sort of conversations that wouldn’t happen on a customer facing forum or blog. Zendesk have gained quite [...]
The First of the Acquisitions
It was only a matter of time before one of the fledgling accounting SaaS vendors sold their business either in part or in full. Only last week I was sitting down with someone in San Francisco discussing what Microsoft’s canning of Money means for online accounting – we both agreed that the next couple of [...]
Adoption – Slow but not That Slow
Yesterday I took part in a meeting for an advisory group that I belong to that’s looking at ways to deliver Government services to small businesses in a more integrated, simple and customized way. At the session, interestingly enough, were the GM of a traditional desktop accounting software product, and the CEO of a SaaS [...]
Xero Releases Multi-currency and First Hint of Tiered Pricing
(Disclosure – in the lead-up to the release of multi-currency, I did a very small amount of contracting to Xero to produce some marketing videos) A couple of months ago while I was in San Francisco I saw a sneak preview of some screen flows for Xero’s multi-currency capability. At the time I was pretty [...]
Update to Workingpoint / Netbooks Post
Just a quick note (since those who have read the original may miss the news) that I’ve updated my post on WorkingPoint, formerly Netbooks. The title is changed too, and it speaks for itself (addition in italics): Netbooks Emerges from Hibernation as WorkingPoint: SaaS for SMB, with Nicer UI but Reduced Functionality.
Netbooks Emerges from Hibernation as WorkingPoint: SaaS for SMB, with Nicer UI but Reduced Functionality.
(This post is now updated, see bottom)Netbooks, provider of an Integrated SaaS Business Suite for Very Small Businesses came out of hibernation with a new name: WorkingPoint. In the never-ending debate of all-in-one vs. best-of-breed I tend to represent the “old-school” which believes in the value of having one tightly integrated system for most business [...]
SAP’s On-Demand Portfolio: Powerpoint for Now
John Wookey has a tough job. The former Oracle Exec, currently EVP @ SAP, the Enterprise Software leader is supposed to charter SAP’s foray into On-Demand – in a company whose bread-and-butter is clearly in installed applications and which still largely considers a threat to its traditional lucrative business. He spent the first 6 months [...]
Intuit Launches the IPP Version 2
This morning Intuit will lift the wraps on the latest version of the Intuit Partner Platform. I took a briefing from Alex Chriss, Business leader of the IPP a few days ago (disclosure – I’m travelling to Boston for Enterprise 2.0 in a few weeks and will be doing some work with Intuit around the [...]
Yuuguu aggregates your IM… on the side
Image via CrunchBase Yuuguu is a screen sharing, collaboration and web conferencing service. It sits nicely in the WebEx space, but without the big price tag. (As a reference Yuuguu’s free if you’re only screen sharing with five people – if you need more than that the 30 attendee paid plan runs $15 per month [...]
Review – Fusion Accounting
Accounting 2.0 at CloudAve In an ongoing series of reviews and analysis pieces, CloudAve will be taking a deep look into accounting software for the new world. See the other posts at this tag Introduction & Background Fusion Accounts is another product borne out of necessity. A bunch of developers needing an accounting solution on [...]
Small Business Hosting: The Old Way And The Cloud Way
Recently, one of our clients faced an issue on their server which they were hosting with a well known managed provider (traditional dedicated hosting approach). Let us compare the consequences of their problem in both the old fashioned approach of having a dedicated server at a collocation center or a managed hosting provider and in [...]
The Acquisitions Begin
I’ve had a few conversations with people inside the SaaS accounting industry in the past few weeks and there is something of a crescendo of voices predicting the next couple of years will see a real consolidation in the space. There are so many vendors, many of whom haven’t got clarity around their monetisation strategies. [...]
Think About the Laggards
One of my businesses is a small manufacturing company that makes backpacks and outdoor clothing. A little while ago Zoli suggested to me that I should use the experience we have (in the “real world” as it were) to draw some conclusions as to directions technology companies could take. Today it’s the turn of internet [...]
Paymo – Review
Paymo is a cloud time tracking system that, in something of a novel extension, is soon to begin offering an invoicing system as an adjunct to time tracking. It nicely combines the time tracking and invoicing aspects of jobs and does so on a multi-language, multi-currency basis. Their multi-language functionality is at the user level, [...]
Channel Partnerships and SaaS
Well they seem to be coming thick and fast… Only a few weeks ago I wrote about Intacct scoring a coup in the US by having the American Institute of CPAs choosing them as the preferred SaaS accounting offering. A few weeks ago also I wrote about Xero having Telstra in Australia (and previously Telecom [...]
