Leading executives, managers, and experts from SMBs and large enterprises share their insights and perspectives with bMighty on a host of IT issues, challenges, and opportunities that small and midsize businesses face.
Growing businesses need financial software that will scale with their needs. Intacct strives to fill the need beyond Intuit's QuickBooks and compete with on-premise offerings from the likes of Microsoft and Sage with a software-as-a-service offering. After eight years, Intacct is hardly a newcomer to the software market. However, as software as a service has become a proven alternative for businesses, Intacct's customer base has boomed. CEO Mike Braun talked about why SaaS is appealing to businesses and the limitations of QuickBooks that lead many businesses to start looking for alternative financial software solutions.
bMighty: Before SaaS , where did smaller businesses turn when they "outgrew" QuickBooks?
Braun: In the past, they've gone to what I call the six sisters, the midmarket companies offering client-server software almost completely through VARs: Microsoft Great Plains [now Microsoft Dynamics GP], Sage, Infor, Epicor, Lawson, and Deltek. Last year, the revenue in this category was $7 billion. Great Plains is the most popular of these options, but when you look at ROI studies [PDF] on it, average first year costs can top $300,000. I ask every businessperson I meet what financial system they use and what they spend. For Great Plains, I've never heard a first-year cost of less than $100,000 -- that's not just the license, but also the hardware and network gear. The other systems are priced comparably. Smaller businesses look at those huge numbers and it's no wonder they stretch QuickBooks for as a long as possible.
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