My notes from Intuit talk at Boston Cloud Meetup on Nov 3, 2009.

Per Alex Barnett of Intuit – only 12% of 4m Small Businesses not willing to use hosted data with SaaS.

Webware 100 finalists… best software solutions.

How do cloud-based apps Integrate?

• Finance system know the project in Basecamp is done
• Calendar know about CRM

Simplify by mapping services to a COMMON DATA MODEL (this is a REALLY big deal, IMHO).

QuickBooks have 4 m customers who have effectively agreed on a database schema… exposed an API to this data store. Nice…

The “Small Business Data Cloud” – available today from Intuit – as the Intuit Partner Platform.

native apps

• Flex applications hold the logic
• Server-side Java coming in development

federated apps

• identity
• data
• billing
• most of the action is over here (rather than native apps)

They expect to ship 1.7 m units of QB 10 over next 6-12 months – this will really launch the platform.

4 m users spending 4 b hours per year of screen time

25 million users within these Small Businesses

FAST TIME TO VALUE through SaaS solutions.

Intuit keeps 20% of the rate, rest goes to developers

Can have trial-periods, entitlements (monthly-charged extra features), more options coming next year.

Developers support the apps – Intuit supports everything else.

http://code.intuit.com – some Open Source in here

• some code uses SAML
• support Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, and .NET versions of code, such as SAML gateway

http://developer.intuit.com

Intuit – SMB, 4m customers

Salesforce – Enterprises, 25k customers

Is it a per-user, or per-customer license? Intuit end-users don’t need a license.

Don’t need to license QuickBooks to use the overall platform – but there may be some synergies.

Intuit certifies apps for use in their marketplace. Federated apps go through a third-party security assessment – on Intuit’s dime today, though that may change in the future.