Cloud accounting – unstoppable?

When I first started this blog there were plenty of people saying I was nuts to think that anyone would trust their accounting data to a SaaS/cloud player. Six years on and regular readers will already know the playbook for small and medium sized businesses. To say the current crop of vendors are doing well is an understatement. They’re roaring away with new business. But that only meets a fraction of the economy in terms of buying power. What of the mid-range and large enterprise?

Last week I was at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual customer rally. If you’ve never been then it really is something special. Marc Benioff, CEO Salesforce.com is a master of whipping up a crowd in almost revival fashion. This year he was talking about the ‘social enterprise’ a term I find bewildering in its vagueness yet alluring as an idea. In and amongst, I also attended an analyst day run by Workday. They have been in ‘silent running’ mode the last year. I couldn’t get them to talk for love nor money. This year, it’s action stations as the company fleshes out its financial solution. Prior to the event I had spent many hours digging into the solution and found much that will appeal to service based organisations.

Workday has brought a new approach to accounting that will be interesting to companies wanting to blend HR and finance in the same suite, companies looking to fast track subsidiary business implementations, those who need to implement rapid change in the organisational structure and those looking to get from underneath the burden of endless maintenance costs. The solution scales well and has embedded analytics that are, in some senses, reminiscent of what you can do with QuickBooks but taken to an entirely different and more advanced level. While it cannot compete directly with BOBJ, Cognos and Hyperion, it does a very good job at getting to the operational information needed by line of business managers.

Then there is FinancialForce.com. I met up (briefly) with CEO Jeremy Roche as he rushed from one deal signing to another – three in a single day. I got to see some very cool stuff they’re developing on iPad. I then found out, almost in passing, that behind the scenes, they’ve been helping Rootstock by providing the financials for their manufacturing ERP offering that will work with Salesforce.com. And I got an early demonstration of a time recording app for professional services organisations working on the iPad. How cool is all of that?

Then there’s NetSuite, continuing to hammer away at growing ever larger deals and which is starting to reap the rewards of partnerships it has with Baker Tilly and McGladrey.

And let’s not forget SAP Business ByDesign. I’m fielding calls from firms that are usually Microsoft shops asking about this solution.

If anyone has doubts about the cloud and accounting then the evidence I saw at Dreamforce and at Workday tells me that the opposite is true.