Getting Closer To 100 Percent SaaS - Announcing Intacct-Ready

This morning we announced our new Intacct-Ready program and our four charter members Adaptive Planning, Avalara, QuickArrow and Spring CM at the 2008 Intacct international user and partner conference.

The idea behind Intacct Ready is to make it easier for businesses to move toward 100 percent adoption of SaaS applications. In my keynote at the conference this morning, I did a stand up survey of our conference attendees - it was clear that the typical Intacct customer is already using four or five SaaS applications to run their business. The vision of Intacct-Ready is to work with other leading SaaS companies to make it easy for companies to get closer and closer to their goal of going 100 percent SaaS.

To join the new Intacct-Ready Program, our partners commit, with our help, to develop, maintain and support integration between their products and Intacct. Together we align our customer support policies and in many cases we even align service level agreements. We also certify the integration and work jointly towards measuring and maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction. The idea is to give the customer a seamless experience, where making best of breed products work really well together becomes the vendor's problem and is not an exercise left up to the student.

The Big Hairy Audacious Goal of Intacct-Ready to shift the integration costs and risks of selecting and deploying best of breed business applications from the customer to the vendor. Our intent is to assemble a coalition of the best on-demand applications in every category and pre-integrate them with Intacct. To shamelessly rip-off Doug Harr, the CIO of Ingres, the end-state of this vision is, at least for SMB companies, that the vast majority of IT infrastructure will eventually simplify down to an Internet connection and a router. Now that's cloud computing.

Intacct-Ready is a dramatic change from the old on-premises software days, where integration between applications was a costly, risky and failure prone exercise that was the responsibility of the customer and an army of expensive consultants and integrators.

That whole debacle is what led to the rise of the single vendor suites in the enterprise software world, and has predictably resulted in bad things like low satisfaction, high failure rates and vendor lock-in. SaaS and the new Intacct-Ready program offers a different and compelling vision for bringing together the benefits of the suite (vendor responsibility for integration, maintenance and support) and those of best of breed (great applications that really work.)

You can probably tell that I am excited. I think Intacct-Ready represents a major step toward our vision of help businesses get closer to deploying 100% SaaS. And I am just delighted to welcome our first four Intacct-Ready partners, Adaptive Planning, Avalara, QuickArrow and SpringCM to the Intacct Family. Watch this space for more and more Intacct-Ready partners joining the fold over the coming weeks.