Tag Archive for 'intuit'

New McKinsey study on SaaS for enterprise…

Published by Ben Kepes on April 30, 2008 in IT, PaaS, SaaS, Strategy and Web x.0.

A new McKinsey report just released documents the paradigm shift evident in corporate IT. The survey canvassed 850 corporate software buyers and shows just how much attention on-demand is gaining in their minds.

Key takeaways;

  • SaaS is rapidly becoming mainstream
  • 75% are favourably disposed to utilising SaaS for development and deployment
  • around 20% of this years software budget to be spent on SaaS (higher % for smaller businesses and lower for larger as expected)

McKinsey says the move to web apps creates an ascendency of platforms and splits these platforms into three distinct categories;

  • development platforms (bungee labs, coghead etc etc)
  • delivery platforms (EC2, S3 etc)
  • app led platforms (force.com, intuit’s new offering)

Truth is that the survey doesn’t tell us anything new, corporate IT however is reluctant to jump into something without existing support and traction, this survey will ease their fears about SaaS/PaaS and most likely accelerate the trend.

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PaaS from a bookkeeping app? Think beachheads….

Published by Ben Kepes on April 17, 2008 in IT, PaaS, SaaS and Strategy.

Breaking news from Intuit that they are launching a cloud computing offering to compete with Force, AppEngine, Amazon etc.

Intuit is the creator of Quickbooks (think 3.6million users for their bookkeeping offering) and it would seem that this offering is all about creating applications wrapped around Quickbooks (a la Force does with Salesforce) and creating, in essence, a complete SMB offering.

It’s sounding interesting - a very rough split could see Force take enterprise users, Intuit the SMEs and Amazon/Google the consumer market (although that’s a little simplistic and it is very early days yet).

Bob reports that early customers are working on things like;

  • Customer Service
  • Employee Scheduling
  • Existing software vendors looking to add new modules
  • Solution providers looking to move from 1:1 custom work to converting their domain knowledge into applications so they can sell products 1:Millions

I’ll be keen to read the thoughts of the likes of Apprenda about this - is it a threat or simply further validation of PaaS

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