Intuit wants in on the race to become the platform for enterprise apps in the cloud. It is opening up QuickBase to developers who want to build new hosted Web applications and businesses on top of it. QuickBase has been around for eight years and has amassed 250,000 users. At its core is an online database around which companies can create their own customized enterprise apps for things like project management or issue tracking. Now developers can join the QuickBase beta to develop their own enterprise apps on Intuit’s infrastructure. Intuit will host the apps, take care of the billing, and allow developers to charge whatever they want.
Intuit is joining a crowded field. Salesforce.com has its AppExchange and Force.com. Amazon has its Web services, including SimpleDB. Google just launched its App Engine. And startups like Coghead are also angling for position.
But Intuit already has a lot of small business customers that, in turn, can help it attract developers to its new platform. Bill Lucchini, the general manager of Quickbase tells me:
It is great to have a cool piece of technology, but we have to make sure that developers build successful businesses. Giving them the tools to get in front of our customers is strategy No. 1
He realizes that decent technology is just table stakes. Developers will get access to QuickBase via APIs to use as a foundation for their apps, and they also get hooks into QuickBooks, Intuit’s accounting software that is used by nearly 25 million individuals in 3.6 million businesses in the U.S. alone. Developers will be able to build apps using Adobe Flex and the open-source Eclipse development environment. For the technically-minded, here is a screencast that goes into more details.
Although the economics have yet to be fully worked out, Intuit plans to charge using a utility model similar to Amazon’s that goes up the mnore resources a developer’s app consumes. Says Lucchini:
We are trying to price these things where developers can charge $10 to $20 per user per month and make a profit. Small businesses are pretty price sensitive.
The Web platform wars are in full swing. Which platform will developers flock to for enterprise apps?
Sounds interesting all right - thanks. Will check it out.
- Vasudev
We’ll see, but the small customers they are used to don’t have much aptitude for this sort of stuff. Time to review their API…
Hey TechCrunch,
Unless its a bug in your software (in which case, please fix it), please kick that jackass commenter #2 (Cody - see above) off your site for trying to impersonate me (ineffectively, at that, the jerk, since my name is in the poster field).
(I refreshed the page a few times to check that it was not some problem with my browser, but it still shows as described above).
Thanks,
Vasudev Ram
http://www.dancingbison.com
Salesforce has a compelling and proven platform in this space, with a business application and customers. This provides a good direction when developing a new app and ready customers who see the app as an additional feature. Amazon and Google are just infrastructure providers. They do not provide the same cohesiveness and integration. This new business of Intuit is a good bet from that perspective. There could be a market where Intuit, Salesforce and other such providers integrate more tightly to provide a wholesome business app marketplace where customers can pick and choose all the features they need for their business. Underneath it could be Salesforce powering CRM, Intuit for Accounting and maybe another player for supply chain.
As a quickbooks user I would like to warn everyone that a deal with intuit is a deal with the devil, every year they remove features from the old flagship product quickbooks pro ($175 retail per seat) & adding them to the newer “premier” version ($325 per seat) Now add to that little trick the fact that they are forcing me to upgrade by holding my credit card clearing services hostage. If I don’t upgrade they stop letting me use their service and it’s a HUGE pain in the ass to change services to say nothing of the integration. their service is a bit more expensive but the integration makes it worth while.
all in all, If you haven’t taken the quickbooks pill, avoid it!
NetSuite also has a compelling platform upon which to rapidly build business applications. The choice becomes (a) building and extending your specific business processes without having to rebuild things like accounting, CRM, order management (e.g., NetSuite for building things like vertical solutions), (b) building add-on apps to CRM or accounting (e.g,. SFDC or Intuit), or (c) developing from bare metal (e.g., Google or Amazon)
The cloud computing angle is a logical one for the larger old-school developers with the resources/dollars to market them. The problem is they rely on apps built from the ground up.
How could you possibly stack the Intuit project manager up against tools like http://www.copperproject.com or http://www.basecamphq.com ?
They ought to be partnering with the smaller guys and bringing them on board rather than throwing out the old if-you-build-it-people-will-come tripe
The cloud computing angle is a logical one for the larger old-school developers with the resources/dollars to market them. The problem is they rely on apps built from the ground up.
How could you possibly stack the Intuit project manager up against tools like http://www.copperproject.com or http://www.basecamphq.com ?
They ought to be partnering with the smaller guys and bringing them on board rather than throwing out the old if-you-build-it-people-will-come tripe.
Thanks for the mention of QuickBase. I’ve been an Intuit employee since 1999 and have used QuickBase and its API since it was introduced. It’s a nice product that’s well worth trying if you’re considering an online database, either as an end user or a programmer. My favorite experience with using its API was when we automatically logged things QuickBooks was doing in our QA environment (within Intuit, not outside Intuit) to the DB to track and improve QuickBooks quality during development. It was cool–it served as a central online log where we could find problems that were happening on QA machines. QuickBase would send us an email if a bug was logged, we would fix it and do another internal release, and then we’d see the bug disappear in the subsequent logs. It was easy to do using the HTTP API.
Vendor lock-in is doubly problematic with QuickBase’s offering. Not only are customers locked-in to Intuit’s product suite (see #5 above), but they are locked into Flex as well and neither is particularly impressive.
Has anyone heard that Intuit will be developing on the force.com? This would seem to be in conflict with them opening up QuickBase.