Breaking news from Intuit that they are launching a cloud computing offering to compete with Force, AppEngine, Amazon etc.
Intuit is the creator of Quickbooks (think 3.6million users for their bookkeeping offering) and it would seem that this offering is all about creating applications wrapped around Quickbooks (a la Force does with Salesforce) and creating, in essence, a complete SMB offering.
It’s sounding interesting – a very rough split could see Force take enterprise users, Intuit the SMEs and Amazon/Google the consumer market (although that’s a little simplistic and it is very early days yet).
Bob reports that early customers are working on things like;
- Customer Service
- Employee Scheduling
- Existing software vendors looking to add new modules
- Solution providers looking to move from 1:1 custom work to converting their domain knowledge into applications so they can sell products 1:Millions
I’ll be keen to read the thoughts of the likes of Apprenda about this – is it a threat or simply further validation of PaaS
Ben Kepes is an analyst, an entrepreneur, a commentator and a business adviser. His business interests include a diverse range of industries from manufacturing to property to technology. As a technology commentator he has a broad presence both in the traditional media and extensively online. Ben covers the convergance of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users. 
You are so fast to get this up!
Woot!
I do think it’ll be a very cool platform. Pity the beta is private until summer.
Best,
BW
Employee Scheduling
Doing any scheduling (be it work, email, power stations daily operations, air line crew shifts, etc,…) is complex (I mean algorithm-wise). I know this area well enough (not high level expertise) to write some basic modules in it. I can give those guys at Intuit some hints of where to look (open source projects, commercial APIs & research publications) if they haven’t established it themselves.
Bob – just following the big footsteps of the master!
Thanks for the comment
Ben
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