Archive for the 'SaaS' Category

Canterbury Cloud Camp Unconference

Published by Ben Kepes on October 12, 2009 in Business, Marketing, Strategy, General, New Zealand, PaaS, SaaS, Strategy, Strategy, General and The Cloud. 5 Comments

At the recent Auckland CloudCamp, a few of us got talking and thinking about what a tight network of SaaS/Cloud businesses could achieve – kind of a “united we stand, divided we fall” approach. Down here in Canterbury we have a surprising number of players in this field – all doing great stuff and all, to a certain extent, isolated from the good advice, talent, shared marketing budgets and just plain support of their peers.

To this end we’ve been thinking about developing the CanterburyCloud. So what’s the CanterburyCloud? – well it’s a lot of things. In part it’s a network where start-ups can leverage the communal wisdom of their peers. It’s potentially a co-working space where companies can work and bounce ideas off like-businesses. It’s potentially a marketing platform – a network of businesses that can, to an extent, share marketing budgets and evangelise each other’s products. I guess at the end of the day it’s about creating a Cloud Centre of Excellence in Canterbury – taking the legacy of companies such as Tait Electronics and Jade, and mixing it with a healthy dose of agility and web savvy.

We’re keen to hold an unconference to explore this opportunity – it’s not going to be a tech event, rather it’s going to look at business models, strengths and weaknesses and the general appetite for working together. We’re going to hold the event on Friday 30 October at the Canterbury Development Corporation Training Room 1, Level Two, 193 Cashel Street Christchurch. We’ll be kicking off at 1pm. As is de rigeur for a tech event, there will be pizza and drinks afterwards and (hopefully) a general vibe of positivity and can-do throughout. Telecom New Zealand has generously come to the party and is sponsoring the event – so a big thanks to them for that. Thanks also to CDC for providing the venue.

For those of you who aren’t accustomed to the unconference format, here’s a nice definition courtesy of Wikipedia;

An unconference is a facilitated, participant-driven conference centered around a theme or purpose. The procedural framework consists of sessions proposed and scheduled each day by attendees, mostly on-site, typically using white boards or paper taped to the wall. While loosely structured, there are rules at BarCamp. All attendees are encouraged to present or facilitate a session.

The plan is to have six – eight sessions of around 20 minutes each. As is the norm for this type of event, session planning will happen on the day – come along pre-armed with ideas for topics!

So… who’s keen to come along and explore life on the edge? Feel free to register here, or email smina@memia.com your intention to attend. See you all there.

Dremus Goes 2.0

Published by Ben Kepes on September 29, 2009 in Business, Design, Small business, General, Product reviews and SaaS. 1 Comment

I got an email the other day telling me that Dremus has just released it’s 2.0 offering (review of the 1.0 offering here). The new version takes the existing functionality and adds to it the following;

- More free Themes
- More options for accepting payments (gateways)
- Introduction of localisation (Multi Lingual and Multi Currency)
- Initiate relevant marketing efforts through Special Offers, Coupons or Newsletters
- Improved, interactive web reporting
- Integrate the relevant fulfillment options for your product offering

dashboard

Dremus offers a customized e-Commerce shop for $29.95/month, with no signup or membership fees. Personally I think there’s an opportunity for Dremus to have more of an ecosystem approach, not charging a monthly fee but having a “clip the ticket” approach. Having said that their target market are businesses new to e-commerce who might be frightened off by a percentage approach.

Dremus has a free trial – however readers who signup for the trial by Monday 30 November 2009 have the chance to win one of 50 six month subscriptions. Nice!

BNZ, Outsourcing Design to Xero

Published by Ben Kepes on August 24, 2009 in Business, Design, IT, New Zealand, SaaS and Strategy. 18 Comments

The Bank of New Zealand is a reasonably significant shareholder in Xero and so many of us expected that they’d be working together on the odd project.

What we didn’t expect was that the bank would seemingly outsource their web design to Xero but it looks very much like they have.

This is their current personal login page;

olds

Nothing too outstanding there, pretty standard for a banking site. But just look at what they have coming up in the next little while;

bnzlogin

And compare that to Xero’s own login page;

xero

The BNZ is still only showing teasers of their detail screens (see below), but the fact that they’re both breaking out of the banking status quo, and taking some obvious leads from Xero, makes me wonder just what they have brewing down in the lab.

deets

Watch this space!

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Trineo – Heading for the Big Time

Published by Ben Kepes on August 6, 2009 in Business, IT, New Zealand, New business, PaaS, SaaS and Web x.0. 2 Comments

A few months ago I wrote a post discussing some interesting vertical offerings that I’d seen built on top of the salesforce.com platform. I alluded to a new offering that was, at that time in stealth mode – the company behind that offering, Trineo has been invited to San Francisco next week to pitch to a panel of investment and IT gurus, including Sequoia Capital, as part of the final selection process for the Force 40 Innovation Showcase competition, run by Salesforce.com as part of their Dreamforce conference in November.

Trineo is a development and consultancy service focusing on both salesforce.com implementation and custom force.com development out of the Canterbury Innovation Incubator in Christchurch. Managing director of Trineo, Daniel Fowlie, is going to spend around 26 hours in a plane in order to make a seven minute presentation of his LegalSoftOnline product. LegalSoftOnline is still in stealth mode but I’ve seen both early versions, and the current iteration. In talking about his product, Fowlie said that;

A typical server-based legal practice management system can cost tens of thousands of dollars, with additional IT, deployment and upgrade costs. An online system such as Trineo’s, however, does everything a server-based system does, but is far more flexible, equally secure, and has no large upfront cost.

I’m stoked to see Daniel doing well – both becuase he’s a really nice guy, and more generally becuase he’s building a product from here in EnZed! See more here.

Good luck Daniel!

SmartPayroll Gets on the Service Theme

Published by Ben Kepes on May 12, 2009 in Business, IT and SaaS. 0 Comments

I don’t blog often over here on Diversity any more – CloudAve takes much of my attention these days. Diversity is more about an opportunity for me to be opinionated or to tell stories of Kiwi success stories – I try and do that over on CloudAve too but for some reason some US readers get sick of my parochialism ;-) .

A few weeks ago at the Web09 conference in Auckland I finally had a chance to meet CEO of SmartPayroll, Asantha Wijeyeratne – we immediately found much in common, especially regarding our views of what the real barriers to growth are for small businesses and the potential of connected applications to drive efficiency and productivity gains for SMEs (excuse the volley of buzzwords there).

Anyway, Wijeyeratne just pinged me to tell me that SmartPayroll has just completed it’s integration with Xero. SmartPayroll is the largest of the IRD registered payroll intermediaries through their relationship with Datacom and they’re obviously looking to augment this offering with the addition of a software plus services offering. As part of this integration, Xero have nominated SmartPayroll as their Premium Payroll Partner in NZ.

With another twist in this story, for $83 per month customers can get SmartXero – so what is SmartXero? It is Xero bundled with a high level service and integration offering. Despite all the Web 2.0 tools in the world, as a SaaS vendor grows to scale it simply cannot continue to offer high levels of individual service – as an example Xero provides email support, but no phone support – that’s fine for those of us prepared to either wait or to tinker, but arguably doesn’t address the needs of those who want help from a real person – and now.

So that’s where SmartXero jumps in. I questioned Wijeyeratne about the difference between the monthly subscription to Xero and the offering they are providing – his response? “We will set up the chart of accounts, set up the Bank feeds etc and the general set up. We will then send a trainer to sit with the customer while they do the first month. So all that eliminates the fear of the changeover. Then we back that up with 0800 24×7 telephone support backed up with on-site support if required.”

Of course the biggest gain to be made is by users who use both SmartXero and SmartPayroll – they’re then leveraging both a technology integration and a high level services offering. Asantha indicated the potential to provide a reduced bundle price for those using both products.

While it’d be nice to think that SaaS requires no third party help – the reality is that SMEs need handholding – SmartXero is providing a valuable service for those businesses.

Update – SmartXero has had a name change! It’s now known as SmartBooks Plus

A New Learning Resource from LearningSource

Published by Ben Kepes on March 4, 2009 in IT, New Zealand, New business, SaaS and Strategy. 0 Comments

After many months spent in super stealth mode, Another local SaaS product is coming out from under the covers.

Training management system vendor LearningSource has gone public with their offering. Learning Source is a fully featured, end-to-end training management system that LearningSource believe will;

  • streamline business processes
  • help manage business relationships
  • enhance the learning experience in, and beyond, the classroom

LearningSource has a number of benefits including;

The reduction of administration cost through the automation of communications, built in CRM functionality, centralisation of course creation and automatic dynamic updating of a companies website connected to LearningSource

The strengthening of customer relationships through tracking key contacts, recording all information and managing communications centrally as well as targeted marketing of courses to specific clients based on customer information

Enhancing the value of existing courses by providing a centralised repository of course resources with the ability for attendees to submit content as well as enabling the integrated use of wikis, discussions and blogs.

Improving customer experience through the integration of SMS reminders, mapping information and calendaring.

Enabling continuous improvement via the built in customer feedback system.

The ability to move business information online including storing and managing documents, communicating company new and announcements, coordinating events and activities and the aforementioned facilitation of online collaboration.

LearningSource is designed to either be used as a standalone product, or to be seamlessly integrated into a customers own branded website. The solution has been designed to be easily and rapidly skinned to suit a customers individual requirements. Below is an example of this integration this one for a government funded business growth agency.

What I find really refreshing about the LearningSource offering is that they realise the real value they can add to training providers by giving them an end-to-end management solution – that takes all course and student information and wraps it up in an integrated LMS, CRM and back office management tools. I’m excited to see where LearningSource, another local SaaS startup, takes their offering.

Another Local Payroll Entrant

Published by Ben Kepes on February 12, 2009 in Business, Efficiency, IT, New Zealand, New business and SaaS. 0 Comments

Awhile ago I wrote about iPayroll, a local SaaS payroll provider. New to the scene comes Flexitime, another payroll option.

Whereas iPayroll is an official IRD intermediary, meaning that they can act as a company’s proxy when dealing with the IRD, Flexitime is a standalone service which means companies will still do the traditional cheque sending to the IRD.

In use Flexitime is simple, pretty and intuitive. I’ve gone on record saying that I’m a bit of a fan of applications built on top of flex, in my experience it just seems to increase the chances of creating an application with a great user experience – I’m not sure why but it’s just my observation.

I’ve attached some screenshots below to show how it works. Robert Owen, founder of Flexitime, sent me an email the other day to say that they now allow file downloads for ASB, ANZ, BNZ, National Bank and Westpac. For payroll files.

Go have a look – Flexitime costs $20/month or up to five users. It’s also fully integrated with Xero, creating another time saving (no more horrible journal entries to reconcile an archaic payroll system with an equally archaic accounting system!)

The pay window – probably the first window you’ll see each week;

Enter the hours for an employee – pretty simple;

The all important payslip;

And a nice, correctly formatted PAYE return for the IRD;

Diligent – The End Is Nigh

Published by Ben Kepes on January 21, 2009 in Business, Efficiency, IT, New Zealand, New business and SaaS. 1 Comment

Diligent Board Member Services (lots more info here) yesterday announced that they’d been successful in raising another round of funding. Diligent is positive saying that;

[Diligent] hat its ability to raise capital under such severe market conditions underlines the quality and potential of its Boardbooks product. This investment will strengthen Diligent’s financial position through the current fiscal year so it can continue to drive sales and build its corporate governance focused business.

But funding at what cost?

Looking at the terms it seems like a pretty predatory sort of a deal – vulture-some even

  • Spring Street Partners gained 20000000 shares at 10cents a pop – remember that original investors paid $1. SSP shares are also preferential further eroding the investment of the original shareholders
  • SSP receives a guarantees 11% dividend. This despite no dividend being paid to other shareholders – win/win for SSP: if diligent flies their shares rocket and if it doesn’t they still get to scrape all the cash out of it
  • The SSL shares rank a higher priority both in the event of a liquidation and a general dividend payout
  • SSL can require Diligent to convert it’s shares into cash any time after 60 months
  • Get this – upon a liquidation of DIL, a sale of the majority of DIL’s issued stock or assets, or a merger by DIL with another entity, DIL will be obliged to make a cash payment to Spring Street equal to 1.5 times the face value of all Preferred Shares, after which point the Preferred Shares will convert to common stock and participate pro rata with common stock in distributions to stock holders
  • SSL must consent to a liquidation, a change to the constitution, new borrowing or the issue of more equity

The tale of two listings huh – at the same time that Diligent listed so to did hometown success story Xero. One has built a global product and is ramping up revenue in number of markets, while the other is struggling for its very survival.

Another Global SaaS Accounting Player

Published by Ben Kepes on December 20, 2008 in Business, IT, New Zealand, SaaS and Strategy. 4 Comments

Xero promised a global version in 2009. They’ve just announced that as of Monday, over a week earlier than the promised earliest date, they’ll be releasing their international version.

Read the full details here.

Let’s observe how this Kiwi battler takes on the world!

SageLive – Yet Another SaaS Accounting Product

Published by Ben Kepes on December 19, 2008 in Business, IT, SaaS and Strategy. 1 Comment

Sage has just released the first iteration of their new on-demand accounting product.

Names SageLive, the product has some really smart features, along with some glaring holes.

The biggest question is whether a traditional vendor can really commit to a subscription based product on an ongoing basis – Sage are adamant that SageLive won’t cannibalise sales but I’d not be so sure.

Check out the complete article here.