AccMan

Innovation

In the first part, I talked about Sage’s go to market and highlighted some of the business factors the market will need to consider. In this part I look at what’s on offer through the lens of an interactive demonstration of a live beta. Sage is in open beta as of tomorrow morning so please bear in mind that features we see today may be altered when the final service comes to market.

Architecture

Some pundits make a big noise about the need for full blown multi-tenancy. Chief among them is Salesforce.com which has used the ‘no software’ mantra as a way of differentiating itself in the market while using it as a big stick with which to beat up on premise providers. Phil Wainewright believes that a mixture of on-premise and cloud computing is a viable and, in many cases desirable model.

There are economic reasons why the choice a software developer makes are important. In Sage’s case, it is critical because if they are able to create momentum in the market then they will need to satisfy a high volume of users. That requires a significant investment in understanding software architectures of which they have no experience. The other problem is that once set in stone, software architectures are very difficult to unravel.

Sage has opted for what it calls a hybrid model where it is looking to achieve a high degree of scalability and reliability while pushing processing to where it is needed. In order to keep cost down, a fair amount of processing is done in the browser. The demo I saw was slow with what seemed significant latency. That could be because of the way the Webex link was set up with an understandable round trip delay from Newcastle over to the US and back to me in Spain. I’ll know more when I get to field test.

Right now, I am sceptical about their choice of architecture but that is not to say it is wrong. I will know more once I’ve had further discussions with the company. For now, while in beta running at modest volumes, there should be no major problems.

The company is relying on the Line 50 database for some functions, not least the ability to backup, lock and restore the database. This is important when working with accountants who use Sage’s professional products. The idea is that the professional can lock the database at a point in time and do what they need by way of corrections and then pass the revised database back to the client without it disrupting client operations. If they’ve got this right then this solves one of the major bugbears that professionals experience at period and year end when they have to schlepp disks around and manually ensure that carry forward/brought forward balances are properly aligned. It also means that for professionals that are Sage ’shops,’ the import of SageLive data into their practice systems should be a snap.

Product

I saw SageLive Cash, which acts as a superset to Billing. Therefore, while Billing is a distinct product today, Sage expects that people trying Sage out on the free product and then moving over to Cash will have a seamless upgrade.

Sage has taken advantage of modern technologies to make dekstop assembly as easy as possible. In many ways it looks like a portal with the inclusion of panes for RSS fed news, pop up Google documents and so on. I’m sure Ben Kepes will have something to say on the usability front but at first glance, it looks OK, but without some of the polish I’ve seen in competitive products. Remember this is a beta so in time this criticism may be seen as harsh.

Duane Jackson rendered his verdict a while back but even with that in mind, I’m not quite as critical as Duane who claimed Sage  had not understood what business users need. I think Wayne misses what Sage is trying to achieve. I’d say that if new users want to try everything on offer then they will have a fairly tough learning curve. This is because Sage has attempted to bring relatively sophisticated features to the table. Some are self evident, others less so. For example, there is a direct integration between Google Calendar and the application. This means that a user can quickly visualize what’s going on in the business from amounts owed and owing to deliveries due. This is a level of sophistication that users should be able to manage.What’s more, Sage is bundling Flash demos and extensive help to assist customers in ramping up. I would like to have seen an editable wiki because then customers can write their own instructions the way they feel comfortable rather than attempting to make the best of the cookie cutter help on offer.

Integration of Google Docs and Spreadsheet might be a step too far, unless customers have experience of using all those applications. Be aware that these features are not mandatory and that end users will need to have a Google Apps subscription. I don’t know too many people who are using Google Apps in full, in anger but this might proviude the incentive to make it work for them. Google Docs for instance, as integrated, provides a rudimentary if useful document management system for notes, Ts & Cs templates and the like. Exports to spreadhseet are there as well so customers and professionals can manipulate data relatively easily in Google Spreadsheets.

There is only one invoicing template though it can be customized for logo and end notes. I think this is a big mistake. The ability to readily customize invoices is a huge selling point and one to which Sage should give attention. As an online service, invoices can be dispatched via email in PDF format or printed for snail mail.

Overall, I think Sage has done just about enough at this point to offer the service into the market. But it is unpolished and needs refinement. In some ways it reminds me of the first iteration of SAP Business ByDesign. At the time, colleagues thought it powerful but ugly. I am less worried about the look and feel of the accounting functionality because I believe that is more than compensated by other features I’ve already mentioned. However, if Sage can make the interface easier to use and more pleasant on the eye then they will have taken a signficant step forward.

However, in its current form, Cash does bring into question the ability of customers to get the best out of the product early on. Low end on-demand is different to other solutions in that you need to understand what it does with minimal training - if possible. That’s another economic factor for developers to bear in mind. The mixture Sage has chosen IS different to other offerings and may lead to some puzzlement.

Some say you can’t release a new service without a Web 2.0 feature or two. Sage’s RSS integration, plus the ability to customize inbound news sources is welcome. It’s the sort of thing that users will find useful for what they’re doing in the accounting application. However, although Sage has pre-populated the feeds, what I saw was not well filtered leading to some strange stories sitting side by side. I wish they had included some genuine community features. This product is going into the field with only Sage to support it. Getting customers on board through genuine community efforts cannot do Sage any harm and only serve to help them with feedback and feature requests.

Finally - reporting. This is weak and looks as though it’s been thrown together as an afterthought. Sage has opted for TB, P&L plus Balance Sheet. Keep them by all means for the professionals but please - rapidly develop a graphical dashboard using Google Spreadsheet to give people an instant picture of their financial condition plus a reason to engage with that integration. This is something Xero does very well.

Mobile

The best for last. Sage has provided integration to the Blackberry platform. Right now, users have to pull data to the device but can do some processing from the Blackberry. For business people who are on the road, this is a tremendous productivity booster. It does open up other questions around licensing in small companies but we;ll reserve those for another day. Suffice to say, the mobile client is a paid for add-on.

Sage says that in the next iteration, they will provide a push model. That will allow users to receive automatic alerts.

Final words

I have been pretty scathing about Sage’s on-demand offerings in the past but this is better than I imagined at one level but not up to snuff  at another. It is a beta and given that Sage is actively seeking feedback, it will improve.

However, important unanswered questions remain about both architecture and commercial issues. I sense Sage is making a genuine attempt to get it right. But then I said that about ByDesign and see where it is today. With that experience and the war stories of others in mind, I am cautiously optimistic. But that’s as far as I am prepared to go today.

UPDATE: Ben Kepes took a deeper dive than I and notes there is MORE collaboration than I thought. Also note the colour switch in some of the screens he saw, indicating the UI can be changed pretty quickly. And the fact that some KPI style information is presented graphically on the front end. Those are all good things. Otherwise we seem to be in broad agreement.

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SaaS

Image courtesy of Hugh MacLeod

Dave Turner riffed on my piece about SageLive. In doing so, he makes a valid point that shows benefits for both customers and suppliers on the on-demand world:

[We are] building CODA 2go on top of Salesforce’s Force.com platform rather than our own infrastructure. From our standpoint, using a proven, scalable platform has been a great decision. It’s cut years off our time to market and given us the freedom to focus on application development, which is what we do best. It also gets us quickly past any security concerns that users might have, by using a hosting service and infrastructure with an outstanding record over many years…

The Salesforce.com platform development approach isn’t for everyone. But as I discovered when talking to Cybersafe, an early Coda2Go customer, it delivers benefits when  you are putting customers at the centre of your business.

The question for many is whether finance folk will be happy to see their transaction data held in the internet cloud or whether they will be happier having it under their control in an on premise environment. My personal take is that the difference is perceptual. If you are running your systems through an outsourced arrangement or have your data centres managed remotely then the point is moot.

However, it doesn’t remove the necessity for performing due diligence on the offering, understanding the cost implications and satisfying yourself that the vendor has a solid strategy in place should the wheels fall off. If anything, it adds a set of new questions with which you need be familiar.

Disclosure: Coda2Go is an AccMan sponsor

UPDATE: Emma Hoyle pinged me with a summary of resources put into Coda2Go.

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Tax/Ethics

As I’m getting ready to close out this annis horribilis I read this beautfiully crafted piece from Alan Rusbridger, editor in chief of The Guardian. It candidly chronicles the issues surrounding its botched reporting of Tesco’s tax avoidance schemes in the middle of 2008 and the difficulties the paper had in unraveling the story. While Alan doesn’t play up the points, a few nuggets are worthy of mention:

Some of the most critical developments concerning economics, security, the environment, and social policy are immensely complex and worthy of careful explanation. But they do not necessarily sell newspapers. News organizations in the Western world, struggling with declining audiences and revenue, are shedding journalists, closing down foreign operations, and cutting costs. But they are also increasingly inhibited by efforts—of government officials and of private corporations—to prevent them from protecting sources or from carrying out difficult investigations. Many minds are rightly focused on the regulatory, economic, technological, and legal issues that news organizations committed to serious journalism should be addressing.

It is a sad fact of life that the things which are of interest to me in this realm will never garner a mass audience. To many people, the topic of ethics in the profession are too divorced from the day to day realties people face. Matters not. And I won’t shed any tears for the demise of dead tree technology. Yet there is a certain truth in his assertions. In order to properly uncover some of these highly technical stories, media needs expertise. It turns out The Guardian didn’t have that expertise to hand for the story it was trying to uncover. As becomes clear in Alan’s account, a strategy of partial obfuscation was always going to keep The Guardian at least one step removed from the truths they were endeavoring to understand and expose:

Essentially, the only people qualified to produce wholly authoritative libel-proof assurance are the very people involved in constructing the strategies under scrutiny. They do not come cheap—and many of them have conflicts of interest.^[4] Some would give advice in private, but would not speak in public or in court.

It is hardly surprising Tesco employed a particularly aggressive set of tactics in an effort to not only muzzle The Guardian, but effectively warn it off from attempting further investigative reporting. Even so, Tesco itself incurred significant costs in interpreting its own information such that it could be made available for public consumption. Such is the state of tax planning in the UK that Alan concludes:

The truth is that the advanced tax planning undertaken today by most global companies is as intelligible to the average person as particle physics. This state of incomprehension extends to most journalists, editors, parliamentarians, and, importantly, company directors themselves—executive and nonexecutive.

He is right. I reckon I’m a reasonably smart fellow when it comes to understanding tax schemes - heck I had a bit of a career in that regard many years ago. But I recall many a conversation with Richard Murphy around that time attempting to grasp the implications of what was going on. The fact is when the accountants and lawyers choose to make life opaque, they’re darned good at it. That doesn’t make it right but serves to make it incomprehensible to all but the sharpest minds. The same goes for media endeavoring to untangle the global financial crisis. As Francine McKenna so eloquently put it on audit matters:

The mainstream media demonizes “bad” mortgages, especially if they were given to “marginal” people.  They demonize greedy CEOs.  Well, you’re getting closer.  They demonize the ratings agencies.  Does the average consumer with a 12 year old financial education know who or what the ratings agencies do?   They tried to demonize “fair value accounting,” but no one in Congress really understood what the hell anyone else was talking about so it was hard for the Senators and Congress-people to shout down an accounting standard.  It’s just as well they didn’t try to demonize the Big 4.  Those still watching network news for their updates have no idea of their role either.

It’s not that media doesn’t try. Goodness knows it does its best in a world dumbed down by sound bites. Alan’s essay is testament to that. The harsh reality is that independent experts prepared to do the hard work for the public good are in very, very short supply. If in reading this you’re getting bored with my continuing to mention Francine and Richard then that’s telling you something about the lack of heroes prepared to put their head above the parapet and use their skills to unpack the real story. And if you’re thinking ‘What about Woodward and Bernstein?’ then remember they had ‘Deep Throat’ to guide them all the way. You are very unlikely to find those types of character prepared to come forward in the multi-billion dollar tax and audit world.

Collectively and with others like Prem Sikka, we have voices that are increasingly being heard. We may have slightly different agendas but on one thing I am certain we are agreed. The profession is at real risk of being relegated to history as an artefact of a bygone age. It doesn’t have to be that way. I’ve always held the view that professionals have a pivotal role to play in guiding business. But…the profession has to change. Allowing itself to be bulldozed is not a great starting point.

My hope for 2009 is that the transparency so many of us have been screaming for will finally start to become a meaningful concept in the context of business that has become dangerously opaque. If we see progress on that front, then perhaps it will become much easier to explain what’s happening to the public and in so doing, bring attention to matters which affect us all.

Pic source

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• Roy Greenslade: Tesco versus The Guardian, by Alan Rusbridger

General

As I’m getting ready to close out this annis horribilis I read this beautfiully crafted piece from Alan Rusbridger, editor in chief of The Guardian. It candidly chronicles the issues surrounding its botched reporting of Tesco’s tax avoidance schemes in the middle of 2008 and the difficulties the paper had in unraveling the story. While Alan doesn’t play up the points, a few nuggets are worthy of mention:

Some of the most critical developments concerning economics, security, the environment, and social policy are immensely complex and worthy of careful explanation. But they do not necessarily sell newspapers. News organizations in the Western world, struggling with declining audiences and revenue, are shedding journalists, closing down foreign operations, and cutting costs. But they are also increasingly inhibited by efforts—of government officials and of private corporations—to prevent them from protecting sources or from carrying out difficult investigations. Many minds are rightly focused on the regulatory, economic, technological, and legal issues that news organizations committed to serious journalism should be addressing.

It is a sad fact of life that the things which are of interest to me in this realm will never garner a mass audience. To many people, the topic of ethics in the profession are too divorced from the day to day realties people face. Matters not. And I won’t shed any tears for the demise of dead tree technology. Yet there is a certain truth in his assertions. In order to properly uncover some of these highly technical stories, media needs expertise. It turns out The Guardian didn’t have that expertise to hand for the story it was trying to uncover. As becomes clear in Alan’s account, a strategy of partial obfuscation was always going to keep The Guardian at least one step removed from the truths they were endeavoring to understand and expose:

Essentially, the only people qualified to produce wholly authoritative libel-proof assurance are the very people involved in constructing the strategies under scrutiny. They do not come cheap—and many of them have conflicts of interest.^[4] Some would give advice in private, but would not speak in public or in court.

It is hardly surprising Tesco employed a particularly aggressive set of tactics in an effort to not only muzzle The Guardian, but effectively warn it off from attempting further investigative reporting. Even so, Tesco itself incurred significant costs in interpreting its own information such that it could be made available for public consumption. Such is the state of tax planning in the UK that Alan concludes:

The truth is that the advanced tax planning undertaken today by most global companies is as intelligible to the average person as particle physics. This state of incomprehension extends to most journalists, editors, parliamentarians, and, importantly, company directors themselves—executive and nonexecutive.

He is right. I reckon I’m a reasonably smart fellow when it comes to understanding tax schemes - heck I had a bit of a career in that regard many years ago. But I recall many a conversation with Richard Murphy around that time attempting to grasp the implications of what was going on. The fact is when the accountants and lawyers choose to make life opaque, they’re darned good at it. That doesn’t make it right but serves to make it incomprehensible to all but the sharpest minds. The same goes for media endeavoring to untangle the global financial crisis. As Francine McKenna so eloquently put it on audit matters:

The mainstream media demonizes “bad” mortgages, especially if they were given to “marginal” people.  They demonize greedy CEOs.  Well, you’re getting closer.  They demonize the ratings agencies.  Does the average consumer with a 12 year old financial education know who or what the ratings agencies do?   They tried to demonize “fair value accounting,” but no one in Congress really understood what the hell anyone else was talking about so it was hard for the Senators and Congress-people to shout down an accounting standard.  It’s just as well they didn’t try to demonize the Big 4.  Those still watching network news for their updates have no idea of their role either.

It’s not that media doesn’t try. Goodness knows it does its best in a world dumbed down by sound bites. Alan’s essay is testament to that. The harsh reality is that independent experts prepared to do the hard work for the public good are in very, very short supply. If in reading this you’re getting bored with my continuing to mention Francine and Richard then that’s telling you something about the lack of heroes prepared to put their head above the parapet and use their skills to unpack the real story. And if you’re thinking ‘What about Woodward and Bernstein?’ then remember they had ‘Deep Throat’ to guide them all the way. You are very unlikely to find those types of character prepared to come forward in the multi-billion dollar tax and audit world.

Collectively and with others like Prem Sikka, we have voices that are increasingly being heard. We may have slightly different agendas but on one thing I am certain we are agreed. The profession is at real risk of being relegated to history as an artefact of a bygone age. It doesn’t have to be that way. I’ve always held the view that professionals have a pivotal role to play in guiding business. But…the profession has to change. Allowing itself to be bulldozed is not a great starting point.

My hope for 2009 is that the transparency so many of us have been screaming for will finally start to become a meaningful concept in the context of business that has become dangerously opaque. If we see progress on that front, then perhaps it will become much easier to explain what’s happening to the public and in so doing, bring attention to matters which affect us all.

Pic source

Related articles by Zemanta

• Roy Greenslade: Tesco versus The Guardian, by Alan Rusbridger