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Intuit takes to The Cloud - and sheds jobs
Intuit is to acquire online payroll firm PayCycle for $170 million, but is also laying off 4% of its own workforce, reportsBusinessCloud9.com..Formed in 1999 by ex-Intuit employees Rene Lacerte and Martin Gates, PayCycle adopted a collaborative online application model to guide users through the payroll process. The company generated close to $25m in revenues in 2007 and supports more than 75,000 small-business customers. According to Intuit, the purchase will help expand its payroll offerings and further its move into the software as a service (SaaS).
Hot on the heels of the PayCycle deal, Intuit raised its Cloud profile further with the announcement of the Intuit Partner Program (IPP), an online platform for bringing "federated applications" to small business users.
In the same way that Salesforce.com operates its Force.com platform for other developers, IPP-as-a-service solves a lot of the administrative and infrastructure headaches for third party developers - and users. For more than a year, Intuit has been support a Cloud database system called QuickBase on which small firms and software developers can store data and build applications. This system is being expanded into a broader platform and affiliation programme that will pull a variety of applications together and provide the internal links for data to pass between them.
"By opening our platform to all developers and technologies, we're helping solve small businesses' most critical needs under one unified and seamlessly connected ecosystem," said Alex Chriss, business leader for the Intuit Partner Platform.
In the space of just a few days, Intuit has thrust itself forward as a major Cloud player - and one which brings with it a huge pool software users. These are exciting times for the company, but just as it embarked on its new direction, Intuit announced it was cutting 4% of its work force and making 300 of its 8,200 workers redundant. Intuit last month reported third quarter net income of $484.8 million, or $1.47 per share, compared with $444.2 million, or $1.33 per share, in the year-earlier period.
AccountingWEB.co.uk 9th June 2009
Categories: IT News, Software
Times read: 599
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