Intuit Partner Platform team blog

Advantage Integrated Solutions drives its way to success on IPP

Scott Wyatt of Advantage Integrated Solutions and early adopter of the Intuit Partner Platform recently completed and published the, Advantage SmartRoutes for TomTom GPS, application to Intuit Workplace. We had a chance to catch up with Scott to hear more about his application.

So… Scott, what is the Advantage SmartRoutes for TomTom GPS application? 
Advantage SmartRoutes is an application designed for any company whose staff or contractors drive frequently for sales, service or other calls. SmartRoutes, combined with TomTom GPS devices help centralize, organize, assign and optimize the driving work.  It is a complete commercial solution to improve productivity, service, and lower costs.

Wow! That’s powerful -- how does it work?  
It provides a central repository (or sync with QuickBooks customers) to consolidate all the places personnel need to drive. Then, it geocodes this information using Yahoo! Maps and allows users to visually build optimal itineraries.  Once the route is built, SmartRoutes pushes the itineraries into a selected TomTom GPS unit, which is passed to the driver. It becomes an ‘intelligent navigator’, taking the driver(s) to all the places they need to go, in sequence and most efficiently.

QuickBooks integration?
Yes, SmartRoutes syncs with QuickBooks data to make all customers available within the app. The customer information is then geocoded for mapping and route planning.

How long did it take you to build the app?

Approx 400 man-hours. We contracted outside Flex expertise.

What advice would you give to other developers interested in IPP?
Keep your first version simple for lower cost and quicker to market success. Then build on additional demand-driven functionality as necessary.

You can see a video of the Advantage SmartRoutes in action or try the app directly within the Intuit Workplace.

Current Econonic Crisis is Good For SaaS...

Yesterday I read that IDC (the IT industry analyst firm) has revised its forecast (upward) regarding the adoption by US companies of the Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery and subscription, and that the current economic climate appears to be accelerating the SaaS adoption trend:

"The analyst firm says that recent surveys and customer interviews support its finding that the harsh economic climate will actually accelerate the growth prospects for the SaaS model, as buyers opt for easy-to-use subscription services which meter use, not future capacity, and vendors and partners look for new products and recurring revenue streams."

Good news for SaaS providers...

"While the economic crisis is making its presence felt in many parts of the IT industry, it appears that the Software as a Service (SaaS) market may escape unscathed, as IDC has found that it will expand rather than contract over the coming year.

...SaaS services have benefited by the perception that they are tactical fixes which allow for relatively easy expansion during hard times, and several key vendors finished the year very strong, reporting stable financials and inroads into new customer-sets."

A couple of other encouraging highlights cited from the updated survey report Economic Crisis Response: Worldwide Software as a Service Forecast Update:

• By the end of 2009, 76 percent of U.S. organisations will use at least one SaaS-delivered application
• The percentage of U.S. firms which plan to spend at least 25 percent of their IT budgets on SaaS applications will increase from 23 percent in 2008 to nearly 45 percent in 2010

Interviews with SaaS providers by IDC also uncovered several issues (a number of which are addressed directly by the Intuit Partner Platform (IPP):

• cash-flow shortfalls related to slow-paying current clients (IPP handles all the billing automatically for SaaS app partner developers)
• liquidity challenges stemming from tight credit at lenders
• limited resources to scale up with expanded infrastructure to support new customers and new service offerings, could create some issues with rapid growth of the SaaS market – at least in the longer term (IPP provides all the infrastructure for scale, so no capital investments are required by IPP partners)

So, it seems like this is a great time for software developers to partner with Intuit and take advantage of the increasing demand for SaaS solutions that solve real business needs for Intuit's small business customers.

Please Welcome Tara Hunt to the Intuit Partner Platform

At the Intuit Partner Platform we are focused on providing a fantastic platform for developers to build great SaaS applications; applications that leverage Small Businesses assets (such as QuickBooks data.)  But building a great app is only half the story to building a great business.  To succeed, you need customers buying that app!  One of the core benefits of the Intuit Partner Platform is our ability to drive users to our marketplace and create a vibrant and trusted community for Small Businesses.

With that in mind, I am thrilled to announce a new addition to our IPP team.  Tara Hunt has joined the Intuit Partner Platform to lead our Marketing team, focused on driving Small Business users to our ecosystem’s SaaS applications and building an thriving community for SMB’s

Tara is one of the finest leaders in building on-line communities and is the author of the upcoming book, The Whuffie Factor.  This month, Fast Company named Tara one of the most influential women in technology.  Personally, I think Tara is one of those rare people that has the “special sauce” to energize communities to do great things and that’s exactly what we’re trying to do at IPP and across the Small Business Ecosystem.

Welcome Tara!

e-learning solution for the Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) – can you help?

We are in the early stages of developing a new e-learning solution for the Intuit Partner Platform (IPP), targeted at developers who want to learn how to build SaaS solutions for small to medium sized business and have those solutions sold on the Intuit Workplace.

Your input into this process will be vital in making sure we develop a great learning experience for IPP developers. If you'd like to help us out, please head over to the Intuit Partner Platform forum where we have posted a short questionnaire designed to help us understand your learning preferences, skills, and gaps in the current learning content we provide today.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Thanks,

Alex Barnett,

Group Manager, Developer Relations Intuit Partner Platform and IDN

Frustrated by IE6 security warnings in IPP Applications?

Are you seeing the following security warning when running Flex-based IPP applications in IE6? If so, it is probably due to the fact that IE6 does not like iFrame tags without a SRC attribute.

If you're sure that it's not your code that contains the incomplete iFrame tag, chances are pretty good that you inherited the problem from a javascript file included in the Flex 3 HTML template. For a possible solution, read the article on Justin Mose's blog .  In the article he explains what he found and what he did to correct it.