Intacct Winter 2010 - Democratizing World-Class Financial Management

It's funny how cloud computing changes things.

This is briefing week for my team for Intacct Winter 2010, the latest edition of the Intacct Financial Management System. Briefing week means we are out talking with the press, analysts, bloggers and other cloud computing luminaries about what's going on with Intacct as a company (we're really doing great) as well as about the new features of Winter 2010.

In my old software days, we would typically have launched a new product weeks or months prior to shipping the software and certainly before real businesses were up and running in production on it. In the cloud world it's the exact opposite - because we release new features every month - and we can't possibly go out and brief the press and analysts every month - a new product launch instead becomes more of a recap on new features, enhancements and products we've recently put into production.

In the case of Intacct Winter 2010, even though we're briefing on it this week, most of the new features and products actually became available to our clients in the fourth quarter as part of our standard monthly pace of innovation. We've already trained our clients and partners on the new features and we've already seen very strong adoption.

What's nice about the cloud computing model is that instead of having to talk about hypothetical stories about how a new product might in theory work, by the time we hold our external press and analyst briefings we know exactly what it does since hundreds or thousands of clients are already using the new features in production. We get instant feedback and our clients and partners don't have to wait years between new versions of software - they can effectively take advantage of innovation immediately.

Next week I'll post more about what's in Intacct Winter 2010. The general theme of the release is democratization of world-class financial capabilities - making superior functionality available to small and mid-sized business and CPA firms at a fraction of the cost and risk of traditional on-premises software. We've also delivered a lot to help businesses apply cloud computing to more and more of their financial business processes - to take advantage of the Internet to help their firms be more connected, productive and agile.

I'm looking forward to the week - I always enjoy catching up with the press and analyst community and it's even better when we have such a great story to tell.