Tasos Christidis

In an older post, I explored the impact of SaaS in the Outsourcing business (see here:   SaaS and the outsourcing function ) and the benefits that any outsourcing company and its customers would   enjoy from the adoption of SaaS. In this post I shall explore the benefits that the Cloud computing/SaaS can have in another area: that of the Franchise business. In a Franchising model there is the part of the Franchisor (the company that offers the franchise product) and the franchisee (the companies that reside “below the umbrella” of the franchisor and reach out to the final customer). In any franchise “package” a number of products and services is offered to the franchisee in order to start and maintain a viable business; typically, this includes stock replenishment for the franchisor’s products, training, sales support etc. In some cases, the franchisor also offers the necessary software to run the franchisee business. And this is the issue that we are interested in, tod...

Software as a Service has come to a point to offer a large variety of applications. In its beginning it was all about simple functions, since vendors weren’t too sure about the future of this business (and therefore they were reluctant to make big investments in that area) but also due to the technical complexities that needed to be sorted out before one could deploy and offer an enterprise-scale application (issues like security, access rights, redundancy, disaster recovery, virtualization etc. were not solved in one night). Today, one significant part of the SaaS business is the Accounting Software. One can find a number of vendors that offer this kind of software, starting from small, local businesses and going as high as international players such as QuickBooks and others. But, today, I would like to explore whether there can be a future dominant SaaS Accounting Software, or local solutions will maintain their market share . The basis of thinking is that, although Account...