Increasing interest for Corporate Performance Management (CPM) in Mid-Market Enterprises

In today’s world overloaded with buzzwords, terms such as “Business Intelligence (BI)”, “predictive analytics” and “Corporate Performance Management (CPM)” are confusing to mid-market enterprises.

BI technologies provide historical views of a company’s business operation. Some of the enterprise –class BI solutions now include predictive analytical capabilities also. BI is a term used to describe the technology used to access, analyze and report on data relevant to an enterprise. It includes ad-hoc query, reporting, on-line analytical processing (OLAP), dashboards, scorecards, search, visualization, etc. Initially, most BI vendors lacked the ability to build models that can project in the future. However, in the past 3-4 years, the enterprise-class BI vendors have added some of these capabilities to replicate functionality offered by CPM vendors. BI and CPM are complementary solutions, and the BI platform provides a natural-basis to build a CPM solution. BI solutions are usually very complex and expensive for most mid-market companies. However, some of the more focused and template/wizards driven “Express” or “Fast-start” solutions, which are more affordable (especially if they are available in a online or appliance) and can be implemented in a reasonable amount of time – are becoming interesting for the mid-market if the vendors can show measurable benefits and short-term ROI.

In the CPM world, “predictive analytics” is generally used to refer to software solutions that automate and manage process related to corporate performance – financial forecasts, budgets, financial strategies, financial consolidation, scorecarding, and reporting. Another term used to identify CMP is BPM (Business Performance Management but this is sometimes confused with Business Process Management – two very different areas). Some CPM solutions regularly monitor some key performance indicators (KPI) in terms of actual vs. budget and, whenever a significant discrepancy is identified, help perform root causes to identify sources that could be causing this.

The BI and CPM solutions do not need to come from the same solution provider, as the two technologies are complementary and could co-exist. However, there may be economies and synergies related to getting them from the same vendor (if offered). In some instances, mid-market ERP solution vendors are now developing deeper integration to some CPM solutions (like NetSuite with Adaptive Planning).

In the current tough economic conditions, this segment is under tremendous pressures to improve financial processes, measurements and management of the mid-market enterprises. To adress the above, mid-market businesses are increasingly deploying CPM solutions to improve planning (forecasts and budgets), manage costs/optimize profits and more importantly risk and compliance.

The following companies provide enterprise and mid-market CPM solutions:

• Enterprise CPM solutions: Clarity Systems, IBM-Cognos, Oracle-Hyperion, SAP Business Objects, SAS
  
• Mid-Market CPM solutions: Adaptive Planning, Host Analytics, ProPhix, mid-market versions of the above solutions

Increasing interest and deployment of these solutions by mid-market enterprises is demonstrated by the double-digit growth rates most of these mid-market solution companies are experiencing. The CPM applications are targeted at the mid-market company CFOs, C-level executives, finance team and corporate strategy teams.

How were majority of these mid-market companies addressing the financial planning issues until now? Majority of these companies are using Excel spreadsheets. Using Excel, has significant accuracy limitations and  the amount of time spend on the planning process. It also denies the organization a collaborative, connected and productive planning process. Mid-market organizations need to take a more objective view to replace Excel based planning and replace them with CMP solutions. Some basic analysis on time (and accuracy achieved) spent on Excel planning and the results achieved will quickly show the benefits and ROI that can be achieved by CPM solutions – these can be split into the “hard” benefits quantifiable by replacing Excel and the many potential “soft” benefits derived from using a CPM solution.

Could Video Conferencing become the SMB segment ‘Killer App’ ? At least Cisco thinks so with the Tandberg acquisition!

Good move by Cisco. The key beneficiary of Cisco’s acquisition of Tandberg will be the SMB and mid-market. Cisco already has video Telepresence solutions. However, these Telepresence solutions are primarily enterprise solutions – way beyond the affordability of the SMB (1-499 employees) or the mid-market enterprises (500-1000 employees). Both segments together are referred to as SMB in this blog.

The SMBs and vendors (that service this segment) are rapidly comprehending the business value and short-term ROI that Video Conferencing solutions offer. The global SMB video conferencing solutions and services market opportunity is around $150M in 2010 and forecasted to grow at an annual rate of around 9%. The SMB segment purpose built, cost effective, standards based solutions (from vendors like Tandberg and Polycom) coupled with rapidly declining prices of high throughput network bandwidth are now making the SMB video conferencing market very interesting.

In my 2 previous blogs, I have addresses the market opportunity for these solutions and vendors that provide solutions: Video Conferencing Solution – Now Affordable by the SMBs, SMB’s turning to Conferencing Solutions in tough economic times

Tandberg has an extensive video conferencing solutions family purpose built for the SMB market. With the introduction of the Quick Set C20 solutions, they have priced these solutions more in-line with what the SMB market can afford. What Tandberg lacked was a channel that could sell and service the SMB market – hence, not much of a installed base.

What does Tandberg bring to the Cisco-Tandberg party?

• A complete set of video conferencing solutions for the SMB market that are standards based
  
  • Personal, desktop to conference room based video conferencing solutions
    
  • Desktop video conferencing phone with E20 and the MPX desktop solutions
    
  • PC based video conferencing with Movi
    
  • Conference room based solutions from standard def. to HD with the Quick Set C20
    
• Almost no product overlap between Cisco and Tandberg in the SMB segment
  
• The recent acquisition of Nortel Enterprise Div. by Avaya makes them the market leader in the SMB IP Communications segment. Cisco’s differentiation for these products was diminishing. Adding video conferencing to the Cisco product portfolio will provide the required differentiation.
  

What does Cisco bring to the Cisco-Tandberg party?

Interest in Social Media among Small Businesses Correlates to Number of Years they have been in Business

 

Related insight to my recent blog Small Businesses interest in Social Media increasing rapidly , related to the Number of Years a small business has been in existence. See figure below:

Adoption and use of social media is correlated to ‘Number of years in business’ and indirectly to the age of the owners. As the figure above shows, longer the small businesses have been in existence (indirectly correlated to the age of the small business owner), the usage of social media declines. Small businesses that are in existence for 10 years or less, most likely will have Gen X or Gen Y business owners who have grown-up in the internet age and are well tuned to and more likely to use online communication and collaboration – are much more likely to adopt social media. In their personal lives, they have extensive experience in using web-based tools like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and real-time communications tools like chat and text-messaging – for one-to-many and one-to-one communications. They are more likely to be influenced by online communities and collective ratings of products.

Small businesses that have been in existence for more than 10 years would have Baby Boomers as their owners. Boomers interact with others in their communities around shared interests and common issues, but they prefer to use more traditional communications tools like e-mail and voice communications. Boomers participate heavily in word-of-mouth and value personal recommendations and expert opinions, but they have not embraced social networking in any significant manner. It is difficult for people to change habits quickly. However, if the owners of these long established businesses find that their customers and prospects are increasingly communicating on the social media sites, then it would be prudent to hire a Gen X/Y person who is very familiar with these social media tools to help you develop a social media strategy to cater to your audience based on the social media tools they use.

Even though small business use of social media tools is increasing, not all small businesses need to invest in social media – this needs to be decided based on the nature of your business, your business location and your audience (customers, prospects and partners). Some small businesses that serve local communities in rural areas may continue to do business in the traditional manner, until their audience is ready to communicate with them using these new tools and their revenues and customer satisfaction is impacted by it.

Small Businesses interest in Social Media increasing rapidly

In a recent very small business (businesses with 10 employees or less), Social Media ranked at the top of the list among the tools used by small businesses to market/promote their business (see Figure 1). The use of all ‘Digital Media’ tools by SMB has seen a dramatic increase in the past 2 years at the at the expense of ‘traditional media’ tools. Many businesses are finding that marketing campaigns using traditional media tools are seeing reduced effectiveness in reaching their target audience. Consumers and businesses are placing less trust on information provided through traditional marketing vehicles, as those are mainly static tools supporting one-way conversations – other than word-of-mouth. The new digital media is changing the rules of marketing and even small businesses need to proactively participate in this change.

Figure 1

Why has social media seen this dramatic increase? This is primarily driven by 3 factors:

• Change in the consumer and business workers personal communication environment and habits
• Low barrier to start participating in the social media communications – tools like Twitter, Facebook, WordPress are free. Social media is much more than traditional forms of viral marketing – it is an effective and inexpensive way to convert contacts into a referral network
• Much more real-time communication support to start conversations with existing customers and prospects

As the data shows, most small businesses are already participating in social media to varying degrees. Most of the social media adoption by small businesses is happening in an adhoc and sporadic manner. Majority of it is being driven by their use of of these social networking sites for personal communications. This use of social media in business today is more experimental, some to get a feel of the type of small businesses that are starting to participate in such communications and others to experiment with the type of conversations that are taking place and the type of communications they could have using this medium. As small businesses get more comfortable with these communications media over time, their importance in the marketing communications mix will increase. However, there are several issues that need to be resolved before they become mainstream communication tools for the small businesses. Some of them are:

• Efficient and productive ways to monitor and participate in social media – small business do not have the time to individually monitor the various social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogs, etc. They need tools that can integrate with their existing business solutions to pull-in conversations that could have relevance to them. Some new solutions from vendors like Salesforce.com will help small businesses harness the power of social media through solutions like Service Cloud, Salesforce Answers and Salesforce for Twitter and Ideas. New vendors that provide some solutions in this area include Lithium, Helpstream and Elgg.
• Finding areas where social media can add value and provide business benefit – potential areas include product marketing and customer service
• Integrating Social Media solutions with current marketing tools – Now that we know small businesses are interested in social media, it would be a good (for ISVs) to integrate social media interaction with your current marketing solutions like CRM, e-mail marketing, marketing automation, etc.
• Customer sentiment monitoring – This is area small businesses can monitor conversations that are taking place about their products, brands and competition. Although this area today is primarily leveraged by larger consumer focused companies, over time this information can be leveraged by small businesses also.

To make this communication and collaboration effective and supportive of key business objectives, small businesses need to craft a social media strategy as part of a marketing plan to positively reinforce brand awareness and improve customer relationships.

Key elements to this plan should include:

• Integrate social media into your current marketing plan, don’t abandon what is working to get on the social media band wagon
• Find out where your target audience (existing customers and prospects) gathers online and learn how they are engaged. Start by asking your current customers where they are and then join in.
• Match your audience to the social media tools they use – some people like Twitter other prefer Facebook or LinkedIn. Focus on relationship building.
• Don’t limit yourself to most immediate “universe” of your target. Find people who touch your universe and engage them too.
• Listen to what people are saying about you in the social media world
• Use social media to drive traffic to your website
• Develop plan to measure the success of your social media efforts (topic for another blog)
   

Deciding what survey software to use?

Being a market research, we make extensive use of market surveys, to measure market/customer needs and sentiments. For years I was outsourcing the programming, testing and hosting to outsourced survey houses. However, driven by the current economic conditions and reduced market research budgets, this year I decided to do try the survey programming/testing exercise myself.

My survey software solutions requirements are more complex compared to the standard small consumer type survey. They are usually long (30-40 questions each with several options), with complex and branching, follow-on questions based on previous responses, etc.

Finding the right survey software could be a hard task. There are a large number of vendors to choose from, a cursory look at any of them give an impression that most of them are almost alike. One needs to consideration several factors before picking the right solutions. Some of things you need to know and look for before deciding:

• Survey tool features (considering the complexity of your survey)
• Ease-of-programming and hosting
• Cloud-based or on-premise server based
• Price (use of software and survey hosting)
• Reporting functions
• Performance of solution, especially when reporting
• Training provided
• Support (both telephone, web and user forums)

After evaluating numerous survey tools from several vendors (Checkbox, SurveyMonkey, SurveyGizmo, Vovici, Zoomerang, QuestionPro, NoviSystems, SurveyCrafter, etc.), I selected SurveyGizmo solution for my fairly complex survey needs.

SurveyGizmo is very easy to use; value priced and provides the most extensive set of features among all the survey software solutions I evaluated. It has a simple user interface with an extensive list of question types and survey action that makes designing and testing survey very easy. The reporting functions are also very good. Several other vendors that I evaluated had very poor performance, especially when using the reporting and analysis functions. They also provide very flexible pay-as-you-use pricing, without the need to commit a significant amount of capital upfront (as some of the other vendors do) – this is especially important in the current difficult economic climate.

 

Prognosis on SAP’s Business ByDesign – SaaS based ERP solution for the core mid-market

I came across a good analysis on some aspects of SaaS vs. on-premise vendors and solutions in the smoothspan post Why Do SaaS Companies Lose Money Hand Over Fist?

After reading through the post and various responses, I have some comments that could shed more light on the SaaS vs. on-premise topic and how this relates to SAP’s continued focus on Business ByDesign.

• The global ERP market opportunity driven by the large number of SMB/mid-market companies. In the U.S. there are 11 times more mid-market companies and on a worldwide basis the number is 13.5X.

  	# of U.S. Companies	# of Worldwide companies
  Enterprises (1000+ empl.)	9,000	52,000
  Mid-Market (100-1000 empl.)	100,000	700,000
  Ratio – Mid-market/Enterprise	11X	13.5X

   

   

• The enterprise market is heavily penetrated by ERP type solutions, mostly on-premise solutions. The U.S. mid-market has less than 42% ERP penetration. This penetration of ERP solutions is much lower outside the U.S. Existing SaaS solution vendors until now have primarily focused on the U.S. market, with less than 15-20% international sales (other than Salesforce.com). SAP being a global company, has the potential of ramping up fast in the international markets which is very under penetrated, where SAP already has established relationships and market presence (significantly more than any of the SaaS vendors). This presents a significant upside revenue opportunity for SAP in the mid-market (especially in the 100-500 employee segment which is outside of the sweet spot of other SAP midmarket solutions – BusinessOne and Business All-in-One).
  
• One also needs to look at the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of SaaS vs. on-premise solutions. A recent paper investigated details on this, The TCO of Cloud Computing in the SMB and Mid–Market Enterprises; A total cost of ownership comparison of cloud and on–premise business applications. Thee general conclusions are:
  
  • Considering a 4 year TCO, works in favor of the SaaS ERP solutions when the number of users is less than 400 users. Beyond these numbers of users, the on-premise TCO starts to become better (lower). These would be mostly enterprise companies, who favor on-premise solutions.
    
  • When considers a TCO beyond 4 years, on-premise solutions are better (lower). Again, these tend to be larger companies.
    
• Most of the SaaS vendors like Salesforce.com and NetSuite have a much higher sales and marketing expenses ratio (~ 54% of revenue as shown in the smoothspan post Why Do SaaS Companies Lose Money Hand Over Fist?) primarily driven by their direct sales model. For Business ByDesign, for which SAP is promoting a channel driven model, this percentage should be lower.
  
• R&D spending of 16% by SaaS companies – the strategy that needs to be explored by vendors looking to develop SaaS products, they need to seriously consider SaaS platforms like force.com (from Salesforce.com) and QuickBase (from Intuit). The developers that have used these platforms, have significantly reduced both their initial R&D spending and also their product development timeframe, brining SaaS solutions to market in some cases 1-2 years sooner. These SaaS/cloud platforms-as-a-service were not available when SAP embarked on development of ByD (or would they have used one, even if it was available…I am sure they have developed a significant internal expertise with this development experience). It is prudent for SAP to control the roll-out of Business-ByDesign until the product, delivery and channel kinks have been worked out. Prediction – Past experience with German engineering should alert the ERP market that in 2010, SAP will probably deliver a successful mid-market SaaS ERP solution for the core mid-market.
  

Reviewing the above, including good reviews from the current customers of Business ByDesign, it would be prudent for SAP not to scale back efforts on the roll-out of Business ByDesign – as strategy they have consistently communicating to the market.

Avaya-Nortel will prove to be a formidable competitor for Cisco in the SMB Voice & Unified Communications Market

Avaya will be runaway market share leader in the SMB and Mid-Market Voice Communications Segment with the purchase of Nortel Enterpriser Solution business

Avaya has been in heavy competition with Cisco for the SMB and Mid-Market Unified Communications market, with Cisco steadily gaining market share in the SMB IP-communication segment. However, the combined Avaya-Nortel will position them with roughly twice the market share in the worldwide SMB market – close to 30%, almost 2X of Cisco.

Sure there is product overlap between Avaya and Nortel SMB and mid-market products on the TDM and IP telephony side. However, the Nortel BCM product line is very strong and appealing to the SMB sector. Avaya has no products on the data networking side.

Avaya has been facing problems competing with Cisco on the IP-Telephony side, as Cisco can address both the IP-telephony side and the data networking product requirements of this market segment. Now that Nortel enterprise solutions include a strong data network portfolio – WLAN, secure routers, wireless access points, firewalls, etc.; Avaya will be able to offer a much more complete and competitive solution to the SMB market.

In addition to the products, Nortel will bring Avaya:

• Large and loyal customer base
  
• Leading partnerships with a large number of country leading telecom service providers like BT, Bell Canada
  
• Significantly expanded routes to market with stronger portfolio of data-centric distributors and VARs (in most cases there is not much overlap in the channel)
  
• Expanded geographic coverage
  

The current tough economic conditions have prompted SMB to somewhat slow-down the rate of migration from TDM to IP based voice communications and unified communication solutions. As the economy improves in 2010 and SMB’s again start to review their migration to IP-based solutions – the Avaya-Nortel combination will present a much stronger competitive front to Cisco.

Business Intelligence (BI) – Does it have a place in the SMB and Mid-Market Enterprises?

The recent demise of LucidEra has brought forward the discussion of the need for BI in the SMB and Mid-Market enterprises (companies with 1-999 employees and revenues usually less than $1 billion). My take is that this was based on the limited BI value LuidEra offered and the current difficult economic conditions vs. their SaaS based business model. With the explosion of BI solution targeted at the SMB & mid-market, the BI industry is inundated with newer solutions and scaled-down versions of existing enterprise solution targeted at this segment. I have also seen several discussions on the potential increase in adoption of BI solution based on these solutions being delivered in a SaaS model to address the IT resources and infrastructure in the SMB and mid-market companies.

Business Intelligence is all about gaining 360 degree insight into a company’s business, and helping company executive make decisions based on the facts as opposed to information in Excel spreadsheets or gut feel. Business intelligence can offer significant benefits to small and mid-sized organizations. The problem becomes sifting through the plethora of solutions to select offerings that meet the SMB’s needs. SMBs don’t have the required resources or time to do this.

The key question that needs to be addressed is – what are the BI related need of the SMB and mid-market companies and weather these needs are being met by these BI solutions? The solution delivery model is secondary to the key question. This segment of companies is realizing that business decisions need to be made on more than excel spreadsheets and gut instinct.

SMBs don’t understand data warehouses and BI, as it is applied to large enterprises as they do not have staff that can make sense out of the reporting provided by these standalone BI tools nor do they have IT resources/budgets to integrate standalone BI applications to data from various business applications and business processes. SMBs understand BI in the form of dashboards and reports with drill down capabilities. They need solutions that can provide quick real-time insights and ROI that can have measurable business results. How can the use information from the past to more accurately predict the future or to look at real-time data to more efficiently utilize the existing resources or inventory; make changes to enhance business process or operational efficiencies?

In my recent interaction with business solution vendors that focus on the SMB and mid-market, BI solutions are now available and embedded as part of a larger business solution – integrated business solution like NetSuite; SAP (based on Business Objects acquisition) – Businessone, Business-by-Design, Business All-in-One; Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition; other ERP and CRM solutions (Salesforce.com) .

SMB and mid-market companies need to first investigate the BI capabilities that are already provided by these applications or modules that are already integrated and can be easily add-on to their business application solutions. It does not matter whether these solutions are cloud-based (SaaS), hosted or on-premise; utilizing these exiting BI functionality will provide much easier implementation and ROI compared to bringing in new vendors. Most of the vendors mentioned provide easy to use dashboards with BI analytics capabilities to enhance operational efficiencies, analytical and predictive analysis, risk analysis, forecasting, etc. Business application vendors need to increase their focus on their BI solutions as a key value proposition to the SMB and mid-market.

 

The Compelling TCO Case for Cloud-based business applications in SMB and Mid-Market Enterprises

A 4-year total cost of ownership (TCO) perspective comparing cloud and on-premise business application deployment

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) face a tricky dilemma in today’s tough economic climate. It’s no longer business as usual; companies need to figure out how to survive through the current downturn, and get on track to capitalize on new opportunities that will emerge as the economy starts to grow again. They need business solutions to help them to manage more efficiently day-to-day, and also the intelligence they need to move the business forward.

As SMBs weather through turbulent economic storms, total cost of ownership (TCO) is often top of mind when evaluating new business applications. Many customers have become interested in how cloud computing or software-as-a-service (SaaS) can help lower their costs by eliminating upfront capital investments and ongoing maintenance costs associated with on-premise solutions.

Hurwitz & Associates recently completed an in-depth study comparing TCO of cloud-based business application and equivalent on-premise solutions.

Cloud computing essentially eliminates the need for customers to buy, deploy and maintain IT infrastructure or application software individually. Regardless of the application, the cloud computing vendor takes responsibility for all of the infrastructure required to run the solution–servers, backup, software, operating systems, databases, updates, migration, power and cooling, facility space, etc., and associated internal and third-party staffing costs. Because cloud computing vendors manage all of their customers on a single instance of the software, they can amortize costs over thousands of customers. This yields substantial economies of scale and skill, and lowers TCO.

Key findings from our analysis include:

• Overall TCO for cloud-based integrated solution suite is significantly lower than a comparable on-premise solution. This holds true for both SMB and mid-market firms.
  
• IT Infrastructure costs (hardware, software and maintenance) account for about 10% of the total cost of deploying on-premise business applications.
  
• The cost advantages of cloud computing slowly taper off as the number of users increases beyond mid-market to larger enterprise companies.
  
• Application subscription costs account for two-thirds of the total solution cost in the cloud computing model, where the subscription fee encompasses underlying IT infrastructure and personnel costs required to manage business solution. In comparison, business application costs comprise about 27% of total cost in an on-premise situation.
  
• Costs for internal IT staff and/or value-added reseller (VAR), consultant or systems integrator (SI) resources required for application implementation and support represent a significantly higher percentage of total cost for on-premise solutions than for cloud-based business solutions.
  
• Pre-integrated front and back office functionality in the integrated business application offering contributes to reducing integration complexity and lowers application implementation costs.
  

Intuit’s Federated Apps Cloud Computing Partner Platform Will Provide Very Significant Benefits to ISVs

One of the key technology pain-point (for SMBs) relate to multiple disparate SaaS/on-premise based business and collaboration applications that do not talk to each other (requiring re-entry of the same data) and each with their own separate access, UI, billing and pricing schemas – making it very difficult for them to resolve problems when they occur as they cannot triage the source of the problem. These SMBs lack the IT resources to identify the source of problems in an environment of multiple SaaS applications or have the capabilities integrate multiple soiled SaaS applications (each with a different UI, access requirements and billing platforms) and infrastructure services.

Intuit has a deep understanding of the SMB market based on its proven track record as leading business applications vendor in the U.S. Based on this in-sight, Intuit has developed a much more expansive CONNECTED SERVICES strategy to address the above mentioned technology problem – by providing a platform to connect and distribute all the varied cloud-based SMB applications and also providing a cloud-based development platform for ISVs that want to develop on the Intuit QuickBase platform.

Why is this of value to the ISVs that want to service the 6 million plus SMB companies in the U.S.?

• Aggregation of applications on a cloud-based online application store – the Intuit Workplace portal to be part of the Intuit Marketplace with single sign-on where existing Intuit customers and Intuit and other small business prospects can find, try and buy any of the cloud-based applications that are part of the Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) ecosystem.
  
• The biggest attraction for ISVs to join the IPP is the large installed base of Intuit customers in both the SMB and mid-market segments – more than 4 million plus active customers (with 25 million employees); which can be referred to as Customer Cloud. Reaching potential customers was identified as the biggest challenge by both the IVS panel and the VC panel. Selling to this vast SMB population has been the biggest barrier for ISV (especially the ones with less than 50 employees). Existing VAR channels do not work for this segment, online marketing channels are also very expensive and do not provide an adequate level of exposure to these hard-to-reach small businesses – in most cases the SMBs are not even aware of the application solutions. Successful cases of viral marketing based on social networking are rare. The Intuit IPP provides a platform for these ISVs to ride on the coattails of Intuit (several ISVs that are developing on the Salesforce.com Force.com platform have experienced similar success, although that ecosystem is only limited to applications developed on that platform – the federated strategy of Intuit’s IPP has the potential of creating a significantly bigger ecosystem).
  
• The flexibility to:
  
  • develop new (and existing web applications) cloud-based applications with any programming language, database, or cloud computing resource and then publish them to the Intuit Workplace.
    
  • host the cloud-based solution on Intuit Workplace cloud datacenter or an alternate cloud computing data center (Amazon-EC2, Salesforce.com – CloudForce.com, IBM-Blue Cloud, Rackspace, etc.) and at the same time be part of the Intuit IPP application ecosystem and marketplace and get all the benefits associated with it.
    
• The Intuit Workplace will provide the Single billing and e-commerce platform for all the ISV applications in the Intuit marketplace. This is of huge value of these ISVs.
  

This federated application capability now available on the Intuit IPP. Every application on the IPP will work together, use a single username and password, and be accessible via browser. Some of the federated applications will also work with the Intuit family of products. To make all these applications work in harmony on the IPP – Intuit will run a security assessment and privacy policy review on these applications prior to publication on the IPP. The four integration points for the federated applications are:

• Data: To integrate applications with Intuit Partner Platform data, developers must program against APIs provided by Intuit to enable data synchronization
  
• Login: A Federated Identity Web API allows users to use their Intuit Workplace login credentials to access the federated applications within Intuit Workplace.
  
• User management and permissions: Intuit provides developers with a Web API so that their application can handle processes such as inviting additional users to their application.
  
• Navigation: Developers with existing SaaS applications may have to make minor User Interface adjustments, such as removing sign-in/sign-out links within their solutions. The Intuit Workplace provides this in its toolbar to provide users a seamless experience between applications.