FinancialForce on a Tear
When salesforce.com invested in FinancialForce a few years ago, there was keen interest in how this would help the company grow. There’s never been much clarity around those numbers since the parent company of FinancialForce, Unit4, doesn’t break out the individual numbers of operating divisions. That is a bit clearer now since in its last reporting period, [...]
TradeGecko–Cloud-Based SMB Inventory Launches
I’ve spent couple of decades dealing with the realities of a small business that sells physical goods. The functional requirements of these businesses are surprisingly broad but alas the budget tends to be small. I was interested then to hear from the founders of TradeGecko, a recently launched SaaS inventory
Zuora Partners With a Host of Mid Market Financial Vendors
In my extensive writing around the subscription billing space, I have often noted that it is a very polarized sector of our industry with a handful of well funded companies providing services for large organizations – Zuora, Vindicia and Aria fit in this space. These companies are maneuvering for position
Intuit Pushing Intacct for QuickBooks Graduates
Now this is an interesting piece of scuttlebutt that I was alerted to via a private message. It seems that Intuit have quietly begun pushing QuickBooks users who have “outgrown” their own solutions on to Intacct. This is particularly interesting given the fact that Intuit, a venerable provider with a
Application Integration in the Wild–Can Discrete Apps Work for SRP?
Last week I posted news of Intacct’s new SRP offering that ties together Clarizen, Salesforce and Intacct’s own system. It was timely given that only the week before I moderated a panel at CloudBeat that brought together a bunch of folks who think deeply about the application integration space – those who have a suite [...]
Intacct Launches New UI and Rolls Out SRP
I was briefed recently by Dan Druker from Intacct about their Fall 2011 release which marks some significant improvements and expansions to their mid tier accounting solution. As part of the briefing Druker shared with me a competitive landscape diagram that Intacct produces to show where they feel they sit in the world. It’s actually [...]
SaaS Accounting Roundup
I’ve been travelling for the past couple of weeks and haven’t kept up to date with news from the SaaS accounting companies that I usually watch closely. Here’s a summary of stuff that’s happened of late. Quick general disclosure though, I have consulted to a number of the companies below – more information here. Xero [...]
SaaS Sales – Don’t Discount Traditional Channels
We’ve heard for years that SaaS applications will disintermediate traditional marketing channels with it’s direct to consumer and viral uptake – many were envisaging a future without traditional media usage. The truth however seems to be somewhat different – the number of SaaS vendors I’ve spoken to recently who are embarking on “traditional” approaches is [...]
New Whitepaper – Questions to ask Your Cloud Vendor
Over at DiversityAnalysis we’ve just published a new report – right in time for the Cloud Connect event in San Jose next week. Krish and I wanted to write a very basic report tailored for mid to late adopters as a guide to the pitfalls and problems involved in a move to the cloud (especially [...]
Online Finance – Rigid Segmentation Doesn’t Work
Recently ReadWriteWeb started a series taking a very high level look at online finance. One of the posts discussed the evolving online finance ecosystem. In the post, RWW editor Richard MacManus interviewed CEO of Xero (see disclosure), Rod Drury and repeated Drury’s assertion that online finance can be separated into four distinct types of markets: [...]
Multi-Currency – The Maelstrom Continues
Disclosure – One of my specialties is accounting software – I quote half a dozen vendors in the below post, some of whom I have past or current consulting relationships with. Full disclosure of all my industry affiliations can be seen here. A little while ago I posted discussing the recent introduction of multi-currency functionality [...]
Intacct Winter 2010 – More Strings to the Bow
Last week I had a briefing from Dan Druker, SVP Marketing from Intacct (more here) on their forthcoming winter release and a review of their 2009 performance. First a recap of the past year: 80% quarter to quarter growth in Q4 Over 3300 customers with over 30000 users Massive uptake from accounting firms with their [...]
Crunch Gets It So Right, and at the Same Time So Wrong
I don’t want to enter into a debate about acronyms – Microsoft’s Software + Services moniker gets some die hard Software as as Service loyalists all fired up. For the purposes of this post I’m going to take it as read that we all accept the second “S” to be the most important one – [...]
Intacct Scores a Coup – A Partner Channel for SaaS Accounting
Intacct will announce this morning an exciting partnership with the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) that will see small businesses enabled by the resources the AICPA has, and will see Intacct leverage the customer base that AICPA members have. Intacct sent me details of the partnership last week and yesterday I was given a briefing [...]
What Does “Fully Featured” Really Mean?
In my ongoing Accounting 2.0 series (tag here) I’ve been looking at the way SaaS accounting vendors describe their products. A vast number of vendors bandy terms like “fully featured package around”. Often times this is used to describe a product that fulfils a very discrete subset of the accounting function. Recently some comments around [...]
