November 2, 2004

NetSuite has been touting their wins in receiving "defecting" Intuit customers who outgrow QuickBooks. You've seen their advertisements and you've seen the coverage I've given to it in this space. NetSuite could be right absolutely right but for the wrong reasons.

Let me explain.

QuickBooks Enterprise was built to address the needs of those companies that outgrew Quickbooks. Although Quickbooks is perfect for most businesses, there are thousands of growing businesses that need more robust inventory solutions, multiple users, remote connectivity options, integration with other applications, user security and etc.

Quickbooks Enterprise addresses the needs of these businesses. QBE does have limitations and indeed is NOT for very large businesses who need an even more robust solution similar akin to what a Fortune 500 company might want. Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, NetSuite and others offer these big business solutions. Of course, in addition to solutions focused on the "hip" SMB market.

Manvinder Saraon, Product Manager for Quickbooks, recently explained that Quicbooks has about 250,000 potential customers for QBE out of the larger pool of its core current Quickbooks customers. These 250,000 are growing and sooner or later will be ready to upgrade to Quickbooks Enterprise.

If you will, Intuit has a built in, loyal market (its own customers) for QBE. In 5 years NetSuite had 7,500 users. Quickbooks had 10,000 in 2 years.

Manvinder shares the story of one customer that moved to one of these "big business" solutions, as he did not know of the availability of Quickbooks Enterprise at the time. After consultants, implementation, training and support costs the customer spent about $100,000. If he would have used Quickbooks Enterprise, which would have met his need he could have saved $50 - $60,000.

Quickbooks is $3,500 for 10 users and one year of maintenance and support is included.

Technology consultants have an important role to play in the implementation of "big" business products, not only are they NOT easy to self-install they are not made that way. Many are NOT intuitive.

Although Intuit is not building an army of consultants it is building two other armies: Accountants and Software Developers

Every business needs an accountant and as a business grows the role of an accountant gets even more important. The software product that an accountant uses and recommends is often what the business owner will buy.

The other important army Intuit is building is the developer market - the Intuit Developer Network. Read other articles about IDN on smallbiztechnology.comhere

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