Bill Murphy Gets IT.

LaunchLab is one of those sites I really wish I had the time to explore fully. It’s full of well-written articles for people that are starting or running businesses.

I just saw an article with the title Small business technology for 2009, written by Bill Murphy who is the MD of BT Business. Right at the top if his list of essential small business IT investments for 2009 is software as a service (SaaS).

It’s great to see the UK blue chips finally getting it. It seems the connectivity providers are amongst the first of the big firms to embrace SaaS. That does make sense seeing as it’s the telecoms firms selling the on-ramps and enabling the software revolution.

Over in New Zeland, the big telco company has done a reseller deal with an accounting SaaS provider. Over here, BT seem to promote BeProfessional. It’s a nice bit of kit, and they’ve certainly go some impressive distribution channels. But the last time I looked, the accounting side of the app was pretty terrible. I think it was something knocked together very quickly just to say that they had an accounting ability.

In “all in one” packages like BeProfessional it’s essential to get the accounting side of things done properly. It’s the part that the customer *has* to use pretty much every day. It’s because they’re there doing the accounting that they will use some of the other stuff on offer.

It’s still very early days, so I wont name names, but you should see KashFlow being promoted by one of the big UK telcos early 2009. Keep your fingers crossed.