Late last week the news came out, that Intuit had acquired Elastic Intelligence, maker of the Connection Cloud product - one of the few cross platform, cloud enabled BI solutions in the market. Intuit will use Connection Cloud to complement capabilities of their QuickBase solution.
We look at this event from the Future of Work, Data to Decisions and Consumerization of IT perspective - respectively through the lenses of our analysts Holger Mueller and Alan Lepofsky. Click here to navigate down to the Advice and Point of View sections.
The Collaboration Take
One of the basic tenets of enterprise collaboration software is that it allows people to work together to achieve a common goal. Example goals include planning an event, creating marketing material, closing a sales deal, or any one of a thousand other use-cases where people work together to get their jobs done. Without a consistent structure for entering information, the data in these collaboration platforms becomes difficult to search, filter and report on. Products that use form-based entry solve this issue by having people enter information into specific fields rather than into a blank wiki page, blog entry or community forum.
Intuit QuickBase has been around for more than a decade, allowing people to create applications without having to be an application developer. The acquisition of Connection Cloud and its future integration with QuickBase should allow people to integrate data from other enterprise systems into the QuickBase applications they create.
For example, an organization may be able to create an application for the Sales team that pulls in data from both their CRM and their ERP system, allowing them to get an account overview that is not available in either of those systems on its own.
The SaaS Take
Software as a Service (SaaS) is the growth engine for enterprise applications in general. The unique nature of QuickBase is its capability to get end-users to build and maintain surprisingly elaborate business application. The extensive library of partners and building blocks gives QuickBase users a powerful but end user manageable arsenal of onality.
SaaS vendors need to continuously expand their capabilities and the addition of business intelligence functionality is a key value add for QuickBase.
The BigData Take
One of the biggest challenges for enterprises today is how to create value from big data projects. Though Connection Cloud does not necessarily fall under a big data play - the result of using the product can likely result in one. With the capability of using many of the leading SaaS OLTP products as a data source, Connection Cloud is one of the few products to provide out of the box cross SaaS product business intelligence... and with the combination of multiple OLTP sources - data volumes could quickly move to (lower end) big data volumes.
It will be interesting to see if Intuit can capitalize on the big data trend - especially in the light of maintaining end user ease of use.
The Enterprise Take
One of the most interesting developments in enterprise applications has been end user programming - for quite some time now. No vendor has really tackled the challenge with a workable solution - but Intuit is one of the closer vendors to successfully address the topic with QuickBase.
Through the combination of the existing applications and the capabilities of Connected Cloud, which enable more business intelligence content, Intuit’s lead in this area will be solidified. And it makes a whole new set of applications possible. While previously all OLTP vendors had a lock on BI and reporting solutions to run on their own application and product framework - it may now be possible to build QuickBase applications on top of that. This gives QuickBase a new value proposition to build applications.
Another possibility is, that Intuit will not use Connected Cloud solely for the pedestrian reporting and BI needs - but to extract more data from the SaaS OLTP applications. This would make the integration of QuickBase with SaaS OLTP easier and again open new dimensions of QuickBase application scope.
However, like before - Intuit will have to address the write back problem. Right now QuickBase makes it easy to build one way applications, in the sense that you take data from another system, import it and work on it in QuickBase.
Likewise it supports island applications with self contained data storage in QuickBase. What Intuit needs to address are circle applications that will allow users to start in 3rd party applications, provide value through a QuickBase application and then return that back to that (or another) 3rd party application. Or better for QuickBase - start there, hand over data to 3rd party, process something there, and then return to QuickBase. It matters in enterprise applications where business processes get started and lead to final outcomes.
Advice For Customers
This is good news for QuickBase customers, who get key capabilities added to the product. It’s time to re-evaluate scope of your existing QuickBase applications and see how the additional capabilities will add value to these solutions. Likewise, with the expanded capabilities it’s time to see which new applications you may decide to build with QuickBase.
On the flipside - the formerly amicable relationship between Elastic Cloud and SaaS OLTP vendors, may now change given QuickBase’s competitive status for the overall enterprise applications landscape. So monitor how many connections the Connected Cloud product will have when run by Intuit.
Advice For Partners
This is exciting news and as customers revisit their application portfolio, you should review your product roadmaps and service offerings. How can the future additional capabilities of QuickBase make your offerings stronger and more attractive in the market, how can these capabilities help address new automation areas? These and similar questions should be addressed quickly.
Advice For Competitors
You should not be surprised, as Intuit will keep investing into QuickBase. You will need a strategy to address the power of end user programming and the disruptive nature of that trend to the conventional enterprise applications space - may they be SaaS or classic on premise applications. Intuit (and others) have not fully figured out this one yet - but someone will come along sooner than later and you need to be ready. While Elastic Intelligence enhances Intuit’s integration capabilities, they are still weak on collaboration/enterprise social networking features. In today’s “social business era”, vendors than provide a strong set of collaboration features such as Liking, Commenting, Rating and Sharing should utilize this as a competitive advantage.
Advice for Intuit
This is a great move, you will have to make sure you integrate the more complex BI capabilities in a user friendly way into QuickBase - and make them configurable, usable and extendable by a skilled business end user. Likewise you need to address the circle natured applications we mentioned earlier. Intuit’s next acquisition should focus on improving their enterprise social networking capabilities, enabling people to create, collaborate on and share information in QuickBase applications.
OurPOV
A good acquisition by Intuit, that helps further differentiate QuickBase. Adding new additional scope to its current application scope with business intelligence capabilities, provides QuickBase with extended usage attractiveness to both customers and partners. Keeping QuickBase easy and intuitive to use is the emerging challenge. We look forward to hearing more details on roadmap, pricing and availability.