I first met up with McQueen in San Francisco during Google’s IO event, coming from the end of the world we both do we struck up a bit of a rapport and I got his thoughts on the PSA space. First some context. As McQueen puts it “Managing a professional services company today sucks. Other industries have great systems, but many service businesses are stuck using poor tools, with managers not in control and expensive staff wasting time.” Into this situation walks AffinityLive which focuses on helping professional services companies work, and doing so at cloud economies of scale therefore brining PSA to a lower price-point than was available before.

AffinityLive aims to allow businesses to manage all of their professional service work in one integrated, flexible and easy to use web-based platform. AffinityLive generally fits into the space between CRM/Sales and Accounts, for example:

CRM/Sales/Marketing > ERP/PSA > Accounting & Finance

With AffinityLive, the solution steps are:

1. (optional) A lightweight CRM/sales feature for those companies that are very relationship driven and don’t need a fully featured CRM product
2. Job tracking
3. Issues & support tracking
4. Timesheets & work logs
5. Contract/Retainer management,
6. Resource/staff Scheduling,
7. Document and correspondence management around work and
8. Productivity/Profitability reporting

Once time is logged AffinityLive generates an invoice, pushing it into a specialist finance/accounting package, including Xero, Saasu, MYOB or Quickbooks. They’re also looking to integrate with SalesForce, Highrise and Basecamp by the time of their October launch. Affinity live will have free users (those interacting with the software but not fee earning types, and paid users. Paid pricing is likely to be around USD50 per user per month but is yet to be finalized.

In something of a “secret sauce” feature for an integrated PSA offering, AffinityLive automatically captures all emails to and from clients, filing them against the work they relate to, and also provides integrated document management accessible through the web browser. Interestingly considering the space it plays in, AffinityLive also allows document management via the desktop as a network drive connection – an acknowledgement of the existing desktop-centric model.

In terms of go-to-market strategy, AffinityLive is initially targeting the consulting and creative industries that are growing, and who have between 5 and 100 full time staff. They’ve already amassed “hundreds” of trial users in Australia across a broad range of sizes from publicly traded down to SMB. Their October public release will see them try and make inroads in the US market through a “word of mouth” approach – I’m not entirely convinced that word of mouth will see AffinityLive succeed, the sad reality is that a channel partnership strategy is almost always required when selling these sorts of solutions – while initiatives such as The Small Business Web and the Google apps marketplace will give them some visibility, this is unlikely to translate into significant penetration. McQueen did indicate they’d be looking at a channel strategy leveraging existing Google apps resellers – while this is better than nothing I don’t see that the majority of Google apps resellers have the experience to run a PSA project.

AffinityLive looks like an exciting offering – Professional Services Automation is an emerging space and one where significant value can be generated by using an integrated system – it’ll be interesting to see how they manage to execute on their promise.

So every time I see something that looks like a WalMart approach to marketing, it makes me freeze. Recently I received an email from someone wanting to tell me about a productivity bundle being launched to 100000 users. Alright I thought, this sounds interesting. I visited the site and was welcomed by the following:

Yup – Evernote, Remember the Milk, TimeBridge, MindMeister, RescueTime and Shoeboxed were joining in some crazy scheme to try and sell a few more licenses. Nothing about added value, no special integrations and no obvious cohesion between the apps.

I’ve gone on record as saying that co-marketing initiatives like The Small Business Web, that don’t give users the ability to actually purchase the apps are sub optimal. I still hold that opinion – central points of billing are very persuasive. But at least The Small Business Web is squarely articulating the value of SaaS apps.

It works like this – SaaS tends to have a lower margin than on-premise apps. Anything you do to undermine that value further is toxic to your business’ viability and the industry as a whole. Bargain deals like those in the offer above are the worst of the worst…

Dennis Howlett had a great post giving his perspective on the move from an accounting-centric to a CRM-centric approach towards enterprise software – saying that the various SaaS solutions need to mature rapidly. He gives some examples – NetSuite who, he says, only really got to real momentum after they added CRM to their accounting offering.

Dennis’ key takeaway is that:

In the ‘old’ days, accounting ruled the roost, followed by CRM etc. In the ‘new’ world, CRM has taken the lead. If you believe that to be true then it is only a small step to realizing that development needs to step up.

While the marketplace would seem to prove Dennis’ point, I wonder if that’s a false positive that has been created through the fact that it was CRM that first moved to a cloud/connected model. As such they have a headstart on the accounting world. It’s about reach within organizations. As Dennis pointed out:

Salesforce is a $1.6 billion business but its average customer size is around 23 users

It would be fascinating to see some research into the comparative reach within organizations of CRM and ERP.

Anyway, today Jacob Morgan posted asking whether or not we’re going to see vendor convergence in the Enterprise 2.0 space, while his particular focus was the rapidly burgeoning number of offerings in the space, I think part of what he was talking about is relevant to the suite vs best of breed debate.

It is interesting to take a look at BrightPearl. I’ve posted about them recently and they’re doing seemingly amazing things on very few employees and the smell of an oily rag. They’ve built a pretty persuasive small to mid level ERP system that includes significantly more functionality than many other SaaS accounting players.

So how have they done it? By embarking upon what I’m going to call a quasi-suite approach. BrightPearl have a fully integrated email marketing function – that they’ve not built. Rather they’ve created their own deep integration with MailChimp, a third party email marketing application.

Now some may argue that this is a similar approach to that encouraged by The Small Business Web, but I see it somewhat differently. While it’s true that part of the benefit of SaaS applications is that they facilitate integration through web services, this is still a difficult task and lends to issues around user interface, experience and work flow. Integrations such as those that BrightPearl have created with MaiChimp result in the best of both worlds – the deep integration that a suite brings, with the agility and flexibility of a SaaS app.

To this end we’ve been thinking about developing the CanterburyCloud. So what’s the CanterburyCloud? – well it’s a lot of things. In part it’s a network where start-ups can leverage the communal wisdom of their peers. It’s potentially a co-working space where companies can work and bounce ideas off like-businesses. It’s potentially a marketing platform – a network of businesses that can, to an extent, share marketing budgets and evangelise each other’s products. I guess at the end of the day it’s about creating a Cloud Centre of Excellence in Canterbury – taking the legacy of companies such as Tait Electronics and Jade, and mixing it with a healthy dose of agility and web savvy.

We’re keen to hold an unconference to explore this opportunity – it’s not going to be a tech event, rather it’s going to look at business models, strengths and weaknesses and the general appetite for working together. We’re going to hold the event on Friday 30 October at the Canterbury Development Corporation Training Room 1, Level Two, 193 Cashel Street Christchurch. We’ll be kicking off at 1pm. As is de rigeur for a tech event, there will be pizza and drinks afterwards and (hopefully) a general vibe of positivity and can-do throughout. Telecom New Zealand has generously come to the party and is sponsoring the event – so a big thanks to them for that. Thanks also to CDC for providing the venue.

For those of you who aren’t accustomed to the unconference format, here’s a nice definition courtesy of Wikipedia;

An unconference is a facilitated, participant-driven conference centered around a theme or purpose. The procedural framework consists of sessions proposed and scheduled each day by attendees, mostly on-site, typically using white boards or paper taped to the wall. While loosely structured, there are rules at BarCamp. All attendees are encouraged to present or facilitate a session.

The plan is to have six – eight sessions of around 20 minutes each. As is the norm for this type of event, session planning will happen on the day – come along pre-armed with ideas for topics!

So… who’s keen to come along and explore life on the edge? Feel free to register here, or email smina@memia.com your intention to attend. See you all there.

- More free Themes
- More options for accepting payments (gateways)
- Introduction of localisation (Multi Lingual and Multi Currency)
- Initiate relevant marketing efforts through Special Offers, Coupons or Newsletters
- Improved, interactive web reporting
- Integrate the relevant fulfillment options for your product offering

Dremus offers a customized e-Commerce shop for $29.95/month, with no signup or membership fees. Personally I think there’s an opportunity for Dremus to have more of an ecosystem approach, not charging a monthly fee but having a “clip the ticket” approach. Having said that their target market are businesses new to e-commerce who might be frightened off by a percentage approach.

Dremus has a free trial – however readers who signup for the trial by Monday 30 November 2009 have the chance to win one of 50 six month subscriptions. Nice!

What we didn’t expect was that the bank would seemingly outsource their web design to Xero but it looks very much like they have.

This is their current personal login page;

Nothing too outstanding there, pretty standard for a banking site. But just look at what they have coming up in the next little while;

And compare that to Xero’s own login page;

The BNZ is still only showing teasers of their detail screens (see below), but the fact that they’re both breaking out of the banking status quo, and taking some obvious leads from Xero, makes me wonder just what they have brewing down in the lab.

Watch this space!

Trineo is a development and consultancy service focusing on both salesforce.com implementation and custom force.com development out of the Canterbury Innovation Incubator in Christchurch. Managing director of Trineo, Daniel Fowlie, is going to spend around 26 hours in a plane in order to make a seven minute presentation of his LegalSoftOnline product. LegalSoftOnline is still in stealth mode but I’ve seen both early versions, and the current iteration. In talking about his product, Fowlie said that;

A typical server-based legal practice management system can cost tens of thousands of dollars, with additional IT, deployment and upgrade costs. An online system such as Trineo’s, however, does everything a server-based system does, but is far more flexible, equally secure, and has no large upfront cost.

I’m stoked to see Daniel doing well – both becuase he’s a really nice guy, and more generally becuase he’s building a product from here in EnZed! See more here.

Good luck Daniel!

A few weeks ago at the Web09 conference in Auckland I finally had a chance to meet CEO of SmartPayroll, Asantha Wijeyeratne – we immediately found much in common, especially regarding our views of what the real barriers to growth are for small businesses and the potential of connected applications to drive efficiency and productivity gains for SMEs (excuse the volley of buzzwords there).

Anyway, Wijeyeratne just pinged me to tell me that SmartPayroll has just completed it’s integration with Xero. SmartPayroll is the largest of the IRD registered payroll intermediaries through their relationship with Datacom and they’re obviously looking to augment this offering with the addition of a software plus services offering. As part of this integration, Xero have nominated SmartPayroll as their Premium Payroll Partner in NZ.

With another twist in this story, for $83 per month customers can get SmartXero – so what is SmartXero? It is Xero bundled with a high level service and integration offering. Despite all the Web 2.0 tools in the world, as a SaaS vendor grows to scale it simply cannot continue to offer high levels of individual service – as an example Xero provides email support, but no phone support – that’s fine for those of us prepared to either wait or to tinker, but arguably doesn’t address the needs of those who want help from a real person – and now.

So that’s where SmartXero jumps in. I questioned Wijeyeratne about the difference between the monthly subscription to Xero and the offering they are providing – his response? “We will set up the chart of accounts, set up the Bank feeds etc and the general set up. We will then send a trainer to sit with the customer while they do the first month. So all that eliminates the fear of the changeover. Then we back that up with 0800 24×7 telephone support backed up with on-site support if required.”

Of course the biggest gain to be made is by users who use both SmartXero and SmartPayroll – they’re then leveraging both a technology integration and a high level services offering. Asantha indicated the potential to provide a reduced bundle price for those using both products.

While it’d be nice to think that SaaS requires no third party help – the reality is that SMEs need handholding – SmartXero is providing a valuable service for those businesses.

Update – SmartXero has had a name change! It’s now known as SmartBooks Plus

Training management system vendor LearningSource has gone public with their offering. Learning Source is a fully featured, end-to-end training management system that LearningSource believe will;

• streamline business processes
• help manage business relationships
• enhance the learning experience in, and beyond, the classroom

LearningSource has a number of benefits including;

The reduction of administration cost through the automation of communications, built in CRM functionality, centralisation of course creation and automatic dynamic updating of a companies website connected to LearningSource

The strengthening of customer relationships through tracking key contacts, recording all information and managing communications centrally as well as targeted marketing of courses to specific clients based on customer information

Enhancing the value of existing courses by providing a centralised repository of course resources with the ability for attendees to submit content as well as enabling the integrated use of wikis, discussions and blogs.

Improving customer experience through the integration of SMS reminders, mapping information and calendaring.

Enabling continuous improvement via the built in customer feedback system.

The ability to move business information online including storing and managing documents, communicating company new and announcements, coordinating events and activities and the aforementioned facilitation of online collaboration.

LearningSource is designed to either be used as a standalone product, or to be seamlessly integrated into a customers own branded website. The solution has been designed to be easily and rapidly skinned to suit a customers individual requirements. Below is an example of this integration this one for a government funded business growth agency.

What I find really refreshing about the LearningSource offering is that they realise the real value they can add to training providers by giving them an end-to-end management solution – that takes all course and student information and wraps it up in an integrated LMS, CRM and back office management tools. I’m excited to see where LearningSource, another local SaaS startup, takes their offering.

Whereas iPayroll is an official IRD intermediary, meaning that they can act as a company’s proxy when dealing with the IRD, Flexitime is a standalone service which means companies will still do the traditional cheque sending to the IRD.

In use Flexitime is simple, pretty and intuitive. I’ve gone on record saying that I’m a bit of a fan of applications built on top of flex, in my experience it just seems to increase the chances of creating an application with a great user experience – I’m not sure why but it’s just my observation.

I’ve attached some screenshots below to show how it works. Robert Owen, founder of Flexitime, sent me an email the other day to say that they now allow file downloads for ASB, ANZ, BNZ, National Bank and Westpac. For payroll files.

Go have a look – Flexitime costs $20/month or up to five users. It’s also fully integrated with Xero, creating another time saving (no more horrible journal entries to reconcile an archaic payroll system with an equally archaic accounting system!)

The pay window – probably the first window you’ll see each week;

Enter the hours for an employee – pretty simple;

The all important payslip;

And a nice, correctly formatted PAYE return for the IRD;