The rise of cloud-based offerings – like the accounting system Xero, the customer relationship management (CRM) application salesforce.com and the Google Apps productivity suite – shows businesses are willing to work ‘in the cloud’ with internet-based tools to boost efficiency and productivity.
A late-2012 Forrester Research report, Cloud Strategies Of Online Collaboration Software Vendors, states that more than 56 per cent of software decision-makers were using, or would use, these cloud-based ‘software-as-a-service’ offerings to replace or complement their existing collaboration technology.
Cloud-based software provides businesses with a totally new experience of integration. Gone are the days of exporting and importing files or connecting to local databases to transfer data between applications. Integration is done vendor-to-vendor, eliminating integration headaches for the customer. As integrations are centrally managed and maintained by the cloud providers themselves, they take place directly between systems – often automatically, without any action required from the user once set up.
Forrester’s report refers to an ‘online business applications ecosystem’, where many applications are growing more connected to each other. Google Apps, Forrester notes, is becoming a key component of this ecosystem.
This is a big change from the old days of the open-systems promise of on-premises computing, with customers encouraged to buy from multiple best-of-breed vendors adhering to industry standards that promised seamless integration. The reality was that, in most cases, customers bore the brunt of integration headaches and ended up footing expensive consulting bills to piece together what became complex and cumbersome solutions.
This new way of procuring and plugging together software opens up opportunities for efficiencies in how businesses work and how they manage their accounts.
Simply by carrying out a task on one system, non-accountants can provide a connected accounting system with accounting information. For example, a field service technician can use a mobile job management application that has been connected to the Xero accounting system. Without any knowledge of Xero or accounting, the technician’s actions on the job can create sales invoices in Xero for the accounts staff to review and email out that same day.
This results not only in faster, more efficient processes but also in more accurate ones. There is one single source of data and there are no paper forms to be keyed in, with the possibility of mistake or loss.
Xero has been among the most proactive in working to attract other online providers to work with it. Xero uses an application programming interface (API) – essentially a set of rules for how other applications can connect to Xero’s online program over the internet. A partner program now supports more than 130 partners and lets Xero customers connect to over 200 other software applications. A business using Xero can adopt other cloud-based applications for point of sale, CRM, job management, inventory, advanced reporting, benchmarking and dozens of other functions – and all of them exchange information with the Xero application.
Whether it is Xero, Google Apps or a host of other offerings from small start-ups and giants like Microsoft and IBM, cloud-based software is clearly on the rise. Forrester’s report concludes: “There is a real and growing market demand for these tools.”
