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The biggest benefit of SaaS, as I see it, isn’t the fact that it’s available online and anywhere. Rather it’s the added value that connectivity brings.

A great example of what this can mean in practice comes from the Xero update which came out today. Xero now allows a couple of interesting features;

Click to (Skype) call

Unified Communications (UC) is the way of the future. Imagine being able to click to call, to SMS or to Skype from within your application. Xero has gone half way there with the roll out of click to Skype functionality. Of course it only works when the receiving party has Skype - and it’s be nice to see some functionality for IM or traditional calling - but it’s a step very much in the right direction.

Contact Links

Xero also added the ability to build own custom links to a CRM system directly from within the app.  Users can set up Contact Links under their Organisation settings. Xero has also created a link builder that reportedly makes it easy to match contact fields inside Xero to other systems.

It’s good to see some of the network, and networked effects coming through from Xero - still a long way to go but they’re getting there