Just a quick reminder about our upcoming webinar on Wednesday 18th August 2010 at 2pm AEST. We’ll be looking at a sample of online software for professional services firms.
This is an official event as part of Energise Enterprise, the Victorian small business festival.
Register now
Places are limited, so if you’d like to take part, please register below:
According to Gartner research, software as a service (SaaS) revenue is forecast to grow consistently through to 2013 with worldwide SaaS revenue reaching over $14 billion for the enterprise applications market. This is a growth rate of close to 18% year-on-year, from a 2008 revenue of less than half that figure.
Online Customer Relationship Management (CRM) growth has been forging ahead at for many years with almost 24% of the total CRM market segment falling in the SaaS camp in 2009, according to Gartner. And Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), traditionally ‘back-end’ software for organisations, was the third largest SaaS revenue generator in 2009! Who would have predicted that 10 years ago?
The question that we keep hearing is “are people comfortable managing their company books online”? Will small businesses turn to the web to run their accounts? There still seems to be a lot of concern around this very topic – even in mid-2010.
Our obvious response to this is that people are already doing just that. In fact, people are now turning to online accounting options in droves! Vendors like Xero, FreshBooks, Kashflow, Clearbooks and Saasu have been reporting significant levels of growth in the past few years. A couple of these vendors now proudly supporting in excess of 50,000 customers! I dare say, the jury is already out on that one…
Software Shortlist recently launched our Independent Accounting Software Review Pack, which showcases 10 leading small business accounting software products. This covers all of the major accounting software solutions, including the up-and-coming online offerings. Our expert has taken an independent view of these offerings, defining feature mappings, giving star ratings by dimension, and writing detailed reviews for each product. We have this Review Pack available as a FREE download on our website, but only for a limited time.
A quick glance of this document will give you a good appreciation of how this landscape is changing. Whatever your feeling is on this topic, rest assured that that accounting software industry for SMBs is going to look totally different in 5 years from now!
Today we officially launch the Software Shortlist Directory – a free online resource to help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) quickly find relevant software.
Don’t worry, we see the irony. Here is a company that specialises in shortlisting software that is now giving you a long list of software.
But there’s good reason for this. The feedback on our online recommendation and comparison service has been fantastic, but we have also heard from many customers that they wanted to see the full list of software that sat behind it. There seems to be a certain level of comfort people get from seeing the long list of options. Of course, we suspect that when confronted with a long list of available software, you will appreciate even more the value of our shortlisting service
So, without any further ado, welcome to the Software Shortlist Directory.
The directory includes over 700 products in popular categories such as Accounting, Email Marketing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Project Management, and Small Business ERP. And more categories are being added all the time.
What is particularly distinctive about our directory is that it focuses only on small business software. With no consumer or big enterprise solutions to wade through, you save time and money not having to consider options that aren’t relevant to you.
You will also find the quality of the listings is better than most. We have applied strict selection criteria as part of a global search process to create a powerful resource for small businesses. Our aim is to build an extensive yet high quality list of software — and if faced with a choice, we have gone for quality over quantity.