I think the established playeyrs are beginning to run a bit scared as an SaaS model could affect their licence fee model – although it is interesting to see that CODA have gone for an SaaS alternative.

Clearly with CODA 2go we're just gaining momentum, but if you saw how mobbed we were at Cloudforce the other week, after the launch announcement on stage, you'd conclude that interest in Cloud Accounting is massive.

Which is not the same as sales, I grant you…

Many people predicted 3 years ago it would be 'at least' 5 years before saas accounting made any impression in the UK market. While I would not wish to stick my neck out too far, the current indications suggest we're kinda there.

The investment case is an odd one that depends on segments (which have generally been horizontal so far) and ambition. My sense is that's for another discussion

As Twinfield's numbers show, you don't have to go after hypergrowth to do well enough for your shareholder. Whomever they may be.

Seriously though we are now – in just the past few months – starting to see the UK market start to take off with vendors like Xero and Kashflow posting tremendous growth numbers (and others in elsewhere Europe, eg e-conomic). So the validity of his comments depends on the time period and the market segments he's talking about.

It probably is fair to say that SaaS accounting has until recently been slower to take off in the UK than people expected but perhaps that's because vendors were following the wrong models. You could also argue that SaaS accounting vendors like NetSuite and Intacct in the US have lagged the performance achieved by vendors in other application categories such as Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors, etc. In Intacct's case you could certainly say that was due to lack of investment because the vendor has caught up a lot of ground in the past 18 months since a change of CEO and new funding.

Overall though to state flat-out that "the industry is not growing as fast as people would have us believe" is flat-out wrong, based on the evidence we're now seeing in the market – and compared to the numbers conventional software vendors are currently posting, SaaS growth is rocketing, even for accounting.