As Intuit pushes deeper into cloud computing (Software as a Service or SaaS) its Intuit Connected Services plan is drawing increasing attention. This is #2 of of five daily articles on this important plan. It will connect many QuickBooks small business users to exciting new services and QuickBooks add-ons. QuickBooks add-ons transparently connect to QuickBooks, so users can do many things QuickBooks cannot do. Users never enter data twice and avoid many Excel, Word and pencil errors.
Intuit already said it will open its QuickBase web database, used by half the Fortune 500, to third-party programs. As Intuit pushes deeper into cloud computing it should vastly expand choices for users and create a very valuable big SaaS business for it and its supporters. This will let small business mobile users increasingly use desktops, laptops, and handheld devices to manage more effectively.
As Intuit pushes deeper into cloud computing industry estimates also project up to 30% in annual SaaS growth. All say SaaS will grow far faster than desktop software sales. This will be very good for Intuit for many reasons. Many more QuickBooks users will connect to new services and each other. QuickBooks recently had 94.2% of small business accounting program sales at retail, around four million users and 50,000 registered ProAdvisors. There also are around 75,000 developers of QuickBooks add-on programs. These . Metcalfe's Law says the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system. The many QuickBooks users, ProAdvisors and developers, plus the exponential growth of increasing connectivity, will create very large increases in value.
This is not theoretical. Intuit CEO Brad Smith recently spoke about using this social networking with millions of TurboTax users. Intuit research shows that program users prefer answers from other program users, not Intuit, especially if answers come from those in the same industry. Such a network already connects TurboTax users with in-program links. Many TurboTax users gave answers to more than 40% of the questions of other TurboTax users. Intuit experts found that average user answers were faster and better than average Intuit support answers. This cost Intuit almost nothing, improved service and cut costs. Further service improvements seem likely, with natural language processing supplying possible answers even before posting questions in user forums. Intuit has long been a leader in customer satisfaction, so this should further revolutionize the software industry.
The Intuit pushes deeper into cloud effort is like the very successful effort it made its #1 corporate priority in 2001. This let developers use a Software Development Kit to access QuickBooks desktop files. Mike Block, an independent Fort Lauderdale CPA and nationally known QuickBooks guru, with many years of heavy computer use, management and security experience, became a QuickBooks add-on consultant in 1998. His QuickBooks-Add-ons.com site soon had 10,000 links to these programs, with up to 75,000 hits a day. Many of the links are now dated, but Google now has more than two million comparable QuickBooks Add-ons links. The new SaaS offerings also will be very good for Intuit due to QuickBooks upgrades. Intuit has long known that QuickBooks add-ons users upgrade QuickBooks about twice as often as other users.
Block says this partly relates to why Inuit points to its track record for add-ons and points to its track record for online security. He once sold accounting software with source code. Users of the programs found that most software updates made add-ons not work. However, in the seven years that Intuit has had the SDK there has been no known case where a QuickBooks or SDK update made QuickBooks SDK add-ons stop working.
Block was personally involved in the one widely reported case of a non-SDK add-on that did not work after an update. It involved a payroll tax report program competing with an Intuit offering. Despite this, Intuit fixed the problem five days after Block wrote Brad Smith, counting the weekend before Christmas.
