Xero Hits Escape Velocity With 100000 Customers Count
Xero held its annual meeting last week and detailed its current performance. Xero annual meetings are always an interesting event, Xero has an incredibly supportive shareholder base, while most publicly listed company AGMs include a fair dose of critique and questioning, Xero’s events instead ring to the sound of hand-clapping
Responding to Competition–In the Cloud World–It’s All About Raising the Tide
It’s an interesting trait and one which I believe isn’t specific to Sage – in corporate rooms all across the world, highly paid strategy analysts are spending time agonizing over the impact of a tiny player in their space. That in itself is bad enough, but the flow on effects are far worse.
Sage in the Cloud, but is it too little too late?
Last week Sage, the UK’s biggest accountancy software supplier, finally released their first real online accounting solution. It looks like a proper SaaS or Cloud offering, unlike the hosted Online 50 product sold through a few resellers from 6 years ago, or their previous failed attempt of SageLive in 2009. I would argue that because [...]
No Longer a Prank – Defections from Sage to NetSuite Continue
I called it a Software Marketing Prank, but hey, apparently customers do listen… …and they vote with their feet checkbook. Today NetSuite claims over 500 customer defected from Sage to NetSuite. Make no mistake, this is not simply one software company “stealing” another one’s business… it is defection from ancient on-premise software to SaaS solutions. [...]
Software Marketing Pranks
I envy software marketing types. They get to stay kids forever: pull pranks and even get paid for it.:-) Today’s example comes courtesy of TechCrunch: PayPal competitor WePay dropped a 600lbs ice block at the entrance of the Paypal developer conference. They got chased away and Moscone security removed the ice block. My question: who [...]
A Tale of Two Generations – Sage Languishes while Financial Force Innovates
Software is undergoing a generational change – I thought I’d pull out an example to show what the old generation is doiing and contrast that to what the “cool kids” are doing. I was interested to read Dennis Howlett’s post about Sage recently. In his post Dennis reflected on the signals he’s getting from his [...]
Company.com – It’s All About Community
I’m an advocate for small and medium businesses (SMBs) – coming from a SMB background I’m all to aware of the difficulties that those at the bottom of the foodchain experience. I’ve long been involved in business advisory roles and was part of a team that set up a SMB online community a couple of [...]
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: [...]
SaaS, Accounting, Microsoft Money and Hyperbole.
Over on Accounting Web, a right royal stoush was started when Aqilla’s Hugh Scantlebury wrote an op ed piece opining what the withdrawal of Microsoft’s Office Accounting product means and, more importantly, what is behind the move. For those who need the history, Microsoft discontinued its Office Accounting product line, having determined that; existing free [...]
Pastel My Business Online – Review
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 SoftlinePastel is a South African software house owned by Sage PLC. Pastel was founded in 1990 by Steve [...]
Credit Where Credit’s Due, But the Proof of the Pudding is in the Eating
Just thought I’d mix my metaphors a little, but in this case it’s an appropriate mix. I’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship with Sage. Around the time of the ill-fated release of their SageLive product last year, I spent some time talking to the parent company in the UK about the offering and about SaaS [...]
SaaS Accounting – Six (or Seven) Months On
I’ve been running my Accounting 2.0 series since the very first day of CloudAve – now, seven months on, it seems a good time to look back on what I’ve seen. In the past seven months I’ve reviewed around 25 SaaS accounting products, and written 30 or 40 analysis pieces looking at accounting 2.0. I’ve [...]
On Making Life Easier, and Worthless Whitepapers
A few days ago I heard from Javelin CRM (my review here) that they’d completed their integration with Xero (my review here). Take a look at the video explaining how the integration works; Javelin & Xero from Javelin on Vimeo. It’s kind of odd that after years of evangelising the benefits that SaaS integration can [...]
Old-timers Getting SaaSy
I’m always looking for interesting tales that show the backroom moves of incumbent players manoeuvring into SaaS plays. My team of intel gatherers have picked up an interesting story along these lines. Late last year Michael Jackson, the ex-chairman of Sage, tried to buy UK SaaS accounting player KashFlow for £2.3m. At the time KashFlow [...]
Finding a Babel Fish for Data
I guess the Babel Fish won’t mean much to the new generation of readers of this blog. In the 1981 series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Babel Fish was a creature that, when placed in ones ear, allows anyone to understand anything said, no matter the language being spoken – (see video at [...]
