Tag: MYOB

MYOB’s journey into the cloud

How MYOB is responding to the cloud computing threat by moving their boxed software products onto the cloud

The big winners of the Personal Computer era were the software companies. During that time firms like Microsoft, Oracle and Adobe became some of the most profitable companies on the planet.

With the arrival of cloud computing those profits started to dry up and those software companies that did so well out of the PC era are now scrambling to develop new products to meet a very different market.

Accounting software provider MYOB is a good example of this changing industry – a business that dominated the Australian small business market and supported an army of certified consultants now finds cloud based competitors like Xero nibbling away at their industry position.

MYOB Chief Technology Officer Simon Raik-Allen describes his company’s journey to the cloud in the latest Decoding the New Economy video clip.

“The cloud has amazing benefits for small business,” says Simon. “For twenty-two years we’ve had desktop products and for the last three or four years we’ve had cloud based services.”

“It’s been a really interesting journey, we’ve been on it for three or four years now where we’re converting the company to a cloud company.”

“But it’s also a cultural journey,” Simon observes. “I love seeing how people start to think differently when stuff is in the cloud.”

“Having things in the cloud opens the opportunity for employees to start slicing and dicing data in different ways.”

“It opens up the innovation curve to what’s possible.”

Bringing partners on the journey

Like Microsoft, one of MYOB’s strengths is its partner community – in particularly the company’s twenty thousand strong Certified Consultant program.

Those consultants, like Microsoft’s partners, are seeing their traditional revenue streams challenged as their business models change, a topic discussed with Growthwise’s Steph Hinds in a previous video interview.

“Everybody takes the cloud journey at their own place,” says Simon. “For bookkeepers in particular this is an opportunity to change their business in a positive way.”

“Normally a bookkeeper would drive around and visit two, three or four customers a day and help then with their books. Now they can help twenty customers in a single day.”

Looking beyond the cloud

Simon sees more than cloud computing changing accounting software with connected devices like the Pebble Watch, voice and gesture recognition along with Near Field Communications technology all being built into MYOB and computers in the near future.

“NFC is a very powerful technology,” Simon states. “Imagine in the accounting world where you are doing your books by moving your phone.”

“In retail NFC is going to be big where you can walk up to a product, wave your phone in front of it and it will tell you about the product.”

“We are very much driven by what our clients want,” says Simon. “It comes down to the use case of will it add to our customers’ business.”

An enthusiastic advocate

One of the things that’s impressive about talking with Simon Raik-Allen is his enthusiasm for technology, whether it’s Pebble Watches, NFC enabled robots or gesture controlled accounting software.

MYOB needs that enthusiasm in its move away from the once immensely profitable box software business onto the cloud where margins are thinner, the advantages of incumbency aren’t great and the competition from well funded competitors like Xero is immense.

As with many other ventures, MYOB is dealing with a huge disruption to their core business and the challenges are immense.

Image courtesy of Morrhigan through sxc.hu

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Are Aussie Businesses fleeing the online space?

Business confidence is dragging down online engagement according to a new survey.

Every quarter accounting company MYOB releases its Business Monitor surveying the SME sector’s confidence and how they are using technology along, usually these show more businesses moving into e-commerce, setting up websites and adopting social media.

The July 2012 monitor (PDF File) is unusual as it shows a decline in various online business activities, the main areas that slumped were the following;

  • Paying bills on suppliers’ websites: fell from 44% of respondents to 37%
  • Buying products/services online: fell from 37% to 24%
  • Using internet search engines to promote their business: fell from 31% to 24%
  • Conducting email marketing to potential or existing customers: fell from 26% to 24%
  • Accepting online payments from customers: fell from 25% to 19%
  • Using any form of social media for business purposes: fell from 21% to 16%

All of these are a bit odd, particularly the first three, and it may be an errant group in the 1,000 businesses surveyed.

Of the others, email marketing’s fall isn’t surprising as businesses have been finding returns in this field falling for sometime with customers unlikely to open messages unless there is a compelling reason.

Social media isn’t surprising as there’s a feeling of fatigue among business owners confronted with a new hot platform every few months – increasingly it’s getting harder to become enthusiastic about Pinterest or Google+ when existing experiments in Facebook or LinkedIn haven’t really shown results.

Accepting online payments from customers declining really does indicate a hiccup with the surveyed group, with more online payment services than ever available to small business, it doesn’t make sense that this service is declining.

MYOB’s CEO Tim Reed puts the decline down to economic uncertainty saying, “We also found more business operators are experiencing revenue falls than are experiencing rises, and the majority lack confidence in a short term economic recovery. I suspect this has seen many shy away from online activities as they focus on the health of their business.”

If that is the case, then the small business community is in bigger trouble than we thought. Hopefully MYOBs result is just an errant survey result. We’ll be watching to see what the next index shows.

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Extending the knowledge graph

Big data takes baby steps on our desktops

Google’s latest search changes – introduced by Search Senior Vice President Amit Singhal – are another development, or baby step as Amit would call it, in making data more useful for us.

The flood  of data that’s washed over us since the web arrived has left most of us befuddled. Increasingly, a basic keyword search just hasn’t been enough to find the information we’re looking for and we’ve had to trawl through pages of irrelevant information.

One of the aims of Google’s new features is to make data more relevant to a user – so if someone in the US types “Kings” into Google, they will be given details of the Los Angeles Kings hockey team or the TV series “Kings”.

Those details will include snippets of information about the topic. It could be the teams venue or the cast of the TV show. For tourist locations it could be some basic facts or transport information.

Amit is particularly proud of integrating tourist information and flight details into search and Gmail which indicates Google is beginning to leverage its buyout of the ITA travel booking network last year.

Google’s treatment of data reflects what’s happening with other services. At the recent Australian Xero conference and in an interview with MYOB executives, it’s been emphasised how knowledge is being aggregated to give customers and users better, more useful results.

With Google’s knowledge graph we’re seeing the realisation of what big data can do, there’s many baby steps ahead but there’s a lot of potential.

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Accounting for business change

Cloud computing is changing the accounting industry, how are the incumbents dealing with this?

Small businesses owe a lot to Craig Winkler – in 1991 he bought a obscure Mac based accounting package called Mind Your Own Business (MYOB) and built it into Australia’s leading small business accounting software.

Today Craig is a director and investor of Xero, a cloud computing service which is MYOB’s fastest growing competitor

At Xero’s Australian partner conference, Craig described how the development of business accounting software has evolved around technology opportunities.

MYOB’s massive growth happened as desktop computers became accessible to small businesses. Prior to 1990, it was rare to find a computer sitting on a business desk and they were largely confined to large financial, engineering and government organisations.

In the early 1990s computer prices dropped and as small businesses started using them, the need for desktop based office software exploded. This drove the growth of software like MYOB, Quickbooks and – most profitably of all – Microsoft Office.

Today a similar revolution is happening as computing moves onto the cloud, further reducing business costs and giving small organisations access to the same resources that only big corporations could access a decade ago.

Cloud based companies like Xero and Saasu are now threatening the incumbents like Quickbooks and MYOB who are responding with their own online products.

Tim Reed, the CEO of MYOB yesterday discussed how his business is moving to the cloud. With MYOB’s legacy of desktop based applications which they claim is used by 40% of Australia’s small to medium businesses it isn’t a straight forward process of dropping the old software and embracing the cloud.

Not that their customers are rushing to the cloud, Tim claims that a survey of their clients found that most want a ‘hybrid’ system where data is saved both on the cloud and on the desktop.

MYOB are catering for the hybrid cloud demand with a pilot program of their AccountRight Live product that adds online capabilities to their desktop software.

This is clear difference between MYOB and its cloud competitors. Xero’s founder Rod Drury maintains that those hybrid solutions are cumbersome and adds far more complexity into software. In Rod’s view, “cloud technologies are the right technologies.”

The difference between the philosophies of MYOB and Xero is reflected across the software industry – most notably this is the difference between Google and Microsoft or Apple.

Both Microsoft and Apple see cloud computing as an adjunct to their desktop, tablet and smartphone products. Data is synchronised between the cloud and the device while work is carried out on both.

Google on the other hand tries to do everything on the cloud.

Both approaches have their benefits, particularly in a world where Internet access cannot always be taken for granted which is the cloud’s biggest weakness. Although as mobile broadband becomes ubiquitous in the developed world, that disadvantage is quickly eroding.

Regardless of the differences in the philosophies, everybody agrees that cloud services are going to revolutionise small business. Both Tim Reed and Rod Drury see how the Big Data opportunities in the cloud are going to give business much more access to real time sales, banking and expense data while being able to benchmark their operations against industry performance.

As Craig Winkler described, we are on another big wave of change and there are great opportunities for the businesses that figure out how to use it.

Paul travelled to Melbourne attended the Xero Australian Partner conference courtesy of Xero. He received a private media briefing from MYOB.

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Building an ecosphere

How customers, followers and developers make a business dominant in its field

One of the keys to success for a software platform is its ecosphere  – the community of developers, consultants and advocates that grow around a service.

By far the most successful company in building a community around its products is Microsoft, who over the years have attracted hundreds of thousands of developers and partners to support Windows.

Microsoft’s thousands of partners are the company’s greatest asset in beating back the threat posed by Google, cloud computing and Apple. The sheer size Microsoft’s supporter base gives it a natural buffer against competitors.

Apple too have that buffer, in the company’s darkest days during the late 1990s it was the true believers who kept the flame burning. The ecosphere that has developed around the iPhone and iPad has now cemented Apple’s iOS as being the dominant mobile platform.

The same thing happens around various industry software packages, as one company becomes identified as the leader in their sector they develop a following among users in that industry.

At the Xero conference last weekend, the cloud accounting software company showed how an ecosystem of developers, accountants and bookkeepers are developing around their software platform.

Companies as diverse as inventory management, point of sale system and document scanning services are plugging into Xero’s accounting data which adds functionality for customers.

In turn, those third party services makes Xero more attractive to the bookkeepers and accountants looking for ways to make their jobs, and those of their clients, easier.

Xero’s biggest competitor, MYOB, also has that strength with an army of certified consultants from long being the incumbent in their market.

The battle between Xero and MYOB for dominance in the business accounting software market will depend upon how well the incumbent can hold onto their existing markets and the effectiveness in the incumbent building a ecosphere that makes the newer product more attractive.

Disclaimer: Paul travelled to Melbourne and attended the Xero Partner conference courtesy of Xero.

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