Pearl has developed an integration to IRIS. It had to happen and it is an important landmark. I’ve long felt that the battleground among SaaS accounting providers will be fought on two fronts: directly with customers, which is already happening, and by the extent to which the providers can either give the professional what they need and/or will integrate with with the main professional systems players. This last point is interesting. Today we tend to see accountants’ dashboards that provide a measure of insight into groups of client accounts. They are helpful but only a starting point. Professionals still need a way of getting the data into ‘something else’ so that they can complete the necessary compliance work. Pearl is taking one step in that direction.
Now to the nuts and bolts:
The integration works by mapping the Pearl trial balance to IRIS‘s standard chart of accounts structure through the use of an extra field and then provides an export routine. There is an import routine as well. Pearl has provided some examples of how this works in practice. On the face of it, the routine looks clunky, ably demonstrating the difficulties involved when integrating between systems. Even so, it is a start.
As far as I am aware, this is the first public announcement of such an integrati0n so well done Chris, Andrew and the team. On a broader front, ever since Phill Robinson tipped up at IRIS, I’ve been waiting for the company to say something concrete about its plans in the on-demand/SaaS space. Phill came from a solid stint at Salesforce.com and the only logical reason for his being there would be to put some SaaS vim into the IRIS development teams. Once we see an announcement along those lines from IRIS, it will be game on among all the professional apps players.
There are three scenarios that could develop.
- With the exception of Sage which keeps trying to get something working, the professional apps players are unlikely to develop a competitor to the current crop of SaaS accounting solutions. That could mean the development of partnerships between the SaaS providers and the professional players. If that happens then the SaaS providers will need to choose their marriage partners with care and may even choose to become polygamous. The devil will be in the detail of any deals that may be struck.
- Where SaaS providers offer APIs, the professional players could tap into those and develop hooks of their own to accommodate one or other SaaS vendor. That’s a lower risk strategy that would extend the shelf life of existing professional solutions while tipping a nod in the direction of SaaS. At one level, it would provide the professional players with leverage because they could then cherry pick among the SaaS providers, effectively endorsing their solutions…or not.
- A third scenario is where the SaaS provider decides to extend into the professional market with accounting solutions that meet the need of the professional. This is do-able and represents a natural extension of the dashboard idea. Whether such a strategy could be successful is another matter. The SaaS providers are all minnows whereas the professional apps players are well entrenched. they all still have plenty of development runway in front of them on their core services.
To use that well worn buzz phrase – we live in interesting times.
UPDATE: Both Xero and Liquid say they have had export routines for IRIS for sometime.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Single ledger erosion of professional accounting software (accmanpro.com)
- Is XBRL The Key To Escaping Small Cap Hell? (readwriteweb.com)
- Is the SaaS Business Model Finally Paying Off? (seekingalpha.com)
- Azure gets an ERP app (blogs.msdn.com)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=4813deb2-57f5-44d2-90b3-0863c88fd5de)
