software on the web – Cooper Mann Consulting

Avoid the Aftertaste| QuickBooks Desktop Hosting Comes in Many Flavors

There is a lot of activity and interest around the hosting of desktop applications in the cloud, and it is no wonder that a great deal of the effort centers on the use of Intuit QuickBooks desktop editions. QuickBooks is among the most popular software products used by small businesses, so it makes sense that service providers and hosting companies are taking advantage of that market share to reach prospective hosting customers. After all, a hosting platform may be kind of neat, but it is not all that valuable unless there are applications and data living on it.

For the average small business, the applications of choice include Microsoft Office and QuickBooks. Yes, there is an online edition of the QuickBooks product (called QuickBooks Online, of course). However, the market share Intuit earned for QuickBooks wasn’t accomplished with an online application, it was done with the desktop applications which still own market share today. Hosting service providers recognize this truth, and are taking steps to bring those QuickBooks desktop solutions into the cloud. Now we have the ability to get QuickBooks Desktop editions online – which is not the name of a service but a description of what it offers – available from a variety of authorized hosting providers (and from many unauthorized ones).

I’ve said before that there is a fine art to hosting QuickBooks desktop for lots of users. There are a great many different considerations and possible use cases, and not all providers will be able to meet every requirement. There are also lots of different technology models and methodologies which may be applied to the hosting model, and each has some benefit or barrier depending on the specific need of the client. Hosting companies may throw around terms like “cloud server” or “published application” or “remote desktop”, but at the end of the day, the systems are still Windows computers running QuickBooks software. How those systems are wrapped up, how you connect to them, and how you operate with them often becomes the real difference in the service experience.

The specific technology a hosting provider applies to the service does not necessarily describe exactly how the service works. Just because a provider may use Citrix doesn’t mean they have more capability to provide quality service than a provider using other technologies, or a host using VMWare is not necessarily creating better cloud servers than a host using Hyper-V or Parallels or some other virtualization strategy. The technology may impact how the infrastructure is operated and can impress upon the customer experience, but the real differences in delivery often come down to the provider’s understanding of the software product, the customer need, and their ability to meet the need directly.

Does the experience of connecting to and using the service work for the users, and are people able to get their jobs done quickly using the service without a lot of support or frustration? (**Please note that hosting services aren’t a solution for bad software and poor working processes. If the software or processes aren’t workable now, they’re likely not going to become magically more workable if hosted). Does the hosting service address issues like making the right data available to only the users who need it, and giving access to applications only when a user is permitted to use them? What about “external” users like contractors or client businesses… does the host offer a way for them to also participate in the solution?

It’s important to consider all of the aspects of how the service will be used, and by whom and under what circumstances, to ensure that the delivery offered is the solution needed. The point of all this is to encourage users to concern themselves a little less with exactly what technology the host is using to deliver QuickBooks applications, and to evaluate the actual solution. It won’t typically matter to an end-user what specific technology is being used to provide them with service as long as the service works well for them.

While some people do adopt a fondness for a particular “flavor” of technology or approach, the reality is that a quality user experience coupled with a useful and reliable system means much more to the business. And knowing that there are future options for growing, expanding or simply changing the service is essential. It’s not so much the flavor of technology users should be concerned with when shopping for QuickBooks hosting services, it’s avoiding that icky aftertaste that comes with selecting a QuickBooks hosting approach that just doesn’t meet the business need.

Make sense?

There is a trend among software makers these days to more fully leverage the “power of the web”, and why wouldn’t they? The Internet has become the way businesses and users get and stay connected, and has become a foundation for how business gets done. Remote and mobile access to information and applications has become an expectation of users, as social computing models have encouraged them to remain connected on all of their devices and from any location. Online describes a working model that many businesses strive for, and software makers are seeking to capitalize on the trend.

The belief that software should no longer be installed and run from a local device has been adopted by some of the largest software vendors in the market, which would lead many users to expect that this is the important trend to follow. Being encouraged to ditch their desktop software products and transition to using the web-based or SaaS alternative, users who have grown to trust their software products are now facing new buying decisions. Any time a customer is forced to make a buying decision – like moving from a desktop product to a SaaS solution – there is a potential that the customer will go with a different vendor and leave the product line altogether. Yet this is exactly what is happening with small business applications, and specifically with the tried-and true QuickBooks products – the solutions which had become the cornerstone of small business finance.

Where QuickBooks Pro, Premier and Enterprise desktop editions were the favored and trusted small business accounting solutions, Intuit is now on a wholesale push to get users transitioned to the QuickBooks Online edition. In doing so, they’ve opened up the door for new competitors, because they’re forcing their QuickBooks users to make a new buying decision. Assuming that customers will adopt the QuickBooks Online solution simply because it’s “QuickBooks” was perhaps a poor assumption on the part of Intuit. Particularly by naming the product “QuickBooks”, Intuit invested the trust and long-standing recognition of the brand and product line into the online edition, and the user base and market has not been amused. “It may be called QuickBooks, but it’s not the QuickBooks I want” says one customer. Apparently, the QuickBooks Online edition is not what many experienced QuickBooks desktop users are looking for in a new version of the product.

Desktop QuickBooks users don’t have to move to the Online edition just to get the benefits of the cloud with their beloved QB. The hosting and cloud service providers I work with help businesses run the QuickBooks desktop products as online service. We deliver fully managed applications and data, allowing users to access their QuickBooks desktop products online and from a variety of devices just as if they were web-based. Gaining the benefits of anytime/anywhere access with the added advantage of not changing software is a direction many users are electing to go. While the price of a hosted solution may not be as low as a QuickBooks Online subscription, it is generally far less than a subscription to Salesforce.com, for example. Isn’t the business financial data at least as valuable as CRM? The price isn’t unreasonable, and the benefits of online/remote access, managed IT, protected data, and an ability to take your ball and go home if you like are huge. Grab your data file, install QuickBooks on your PC, and you’re back in action. Can’t do that with most SaaS solutions, can you? It’s only do-able with desktop software, which you can run in the cloud with a hosting provider or run on your own PC.

Assuming that all software will ultimately run online could be a big a mistake. As technology advances and new capabilities introduce new complexities, the “heavy lifting” shifts from the center to the end points and back again. While there may be a trend towards SaaS and leveraging the power of a remote system, the reality is that our devices – desktops and laptops, tablets and phablets and phones – are all getting more powerful. Many SaaS applications and remote access technologies rely upon (and find ways to push more resource utilization to) the local device. Video processes more quickly, input and output devices are more easily recognized, and the storage on the device is faster and easier to access. A lot of work happens on the local device, and it will continue to be this way as the devices continue to get smarter and more powerful. “There’s an app for that” for a reason: apps on the device work well and give users the functionality necessary to get things done efficiently.

SaaS is not all that’s out there – much of the software businesses know and love is still available the way they want it. QuickBooks users need to know they can get their QuickBooks online without having to use QuickBooks Online. The desktop is not dead, and it won’t be for a long time. Desktop software isn’t dead either; it’s just being pushed to the background as software companies attempt to wrap their arms firmly, with subscription based business models, around their respective customer bases.

Make sense?

Avoid the Aftertaste| QuickBooks Desktop Hosting Comes in Many Flavors

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