Business Two Zero

I’ve just seen a press release from our friends at Gartner, trailing their Gartner Outsourcing Summit, March 19-21 in Dallas. They say the worldwide SaaS market reached $6.3 billion in 2006 and is forecast to grow to $19.3 billion by year-end 2011. There were a few quotes I just had to pick out.
At one point […]

Yesterday Sage (UK) Limited finally announced the release of Sage 50 Accounts Professional Online 2007, its first move into the hosted accounting software market, although it was first mentioned by them as long ago as 2005.  Their press release says that recent Sage research revealed that more than a third of customers would be interested […]

Over at Dennis’s place he has a measured critique of Sage In:Touch, a new site which purports to be providing information and inspiration for business.  Dennis skyped me and we had a good tour of the site together.  I have to say I am completely underwhelmed.    I agree with Dennis that the style is sterile.  […]

Last week, amongst the financial numbers in SAP’s 2006 preliminary results webcast, Henning Kagerman outlined their new A1S product and the associated strategy to tackle the mid-market.  Any of us that are involved in enterprise applications, particularly for the SME/SMB market is going to be watching what the market leader does closely.  They’ve talked about […]

John Stokdyk refers to the great SaaS debate that we had earlier in the year within the pages of AccountingWEB in his IT Zone roundup of 2006.  He refers to Dennis Howlett and myself as evangelists for the topic, and their own David Carter, who thinks SaaS is all “just hot air”.  John thinks that: […]

First I have to disclose that this post is a shameless advert for what we do, as well as a plug for one my clients.  At last night’s awards ceremony, my good friends at Goodman Jones won  this year’s Accountancy Age awards in the category “Best use of internet by a Practice“.  They are an […]

Over at AccountingWEB, they reported a survey by the Independent Association of Accountants Information Technology Consultants (IAAITC) which suggests that majority of accountancy practices are failing to embrace technology which could benefit their new and existing clients.  AW says that the survey: “found only a tenth of firms promoted their websites, while […]

There was a period back in the 90s when the major ERP players were collectively called JBOPS - JD Edwards, Baan, Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP.  JDE and PeopleSoft have been swallowed by Oracle, and Baan has disappeared without much trace.  In the late 90s Baan went on an acquisition trail to try and compete head […]

One of the conflicts that the Software as a Service provider has to deal with is balancing the 1 to many, multi-tenancy model, where support of one set of code across a large community provides the economies of scale that make the approach so cost effective for both provider and customer, against the fact that […]

A few days ago Sage announced a global agreement with MySQL AB which enables Sage to embed MySQL database technology into its worldwide product portfolio.  In the press release Chief Technology Officer of The Sage Group plc, Klaus-Michael Vogelberg, explains:
“Having made the decision to further improve the database technology that underpins our products, we chose […]