Xero to Expand Platform Beyond Accounting, Says CEOMonday,...

Xero to Expand Platform Beyond Accounting, Says CEO

Monday, August 12, 2013



Last week Drury spoke to BoxFreeIT about Xero’s plans to move into other business services once it had finished the core accounting engine early next year.


BoxFreeIT:
You compared Xero’s growth to that of enterprise cloud software companies such as Salesforce.com. What point did you want to make?


Rod Drury:
It showed we are world class in the business SaaS (software as a service) space. While we are a bit odd in the NZ market we are benchmarked really well against the big companies.

There are two positive takeaways. Salesforce.com reached $20 million in four years by making large enterprise deals. We use lots of small deals. That gives us confidence that our sales process is world class – and we did it in New Zealand, not the US.

After these businesses get to $20 million in revenue they jump quickly to $100 million. In terms of our annualised revenue run rate we must be getting close to $100 million. We finished last year with annualised revenue of $50 million and now it’s just over $64 million, so you can start to see that $100 million is not too far away.
At our current growth we should cross the $100 million annualised run rate sometime next year. The only other software company in New Zealand at that size would be Orion Health.


(*IMO, Nasdaq listing will happen before Christmas 2014, when revenue hits $100m.
Venture Capital funds are keenly waiting for this to happen*)


............

BoxFreeIT:
What are the connected business services in the roadmap?

Drury:

Accounting software records what things happened. But there are lots of other things we can do to help the business provide a better experience to their customer and all sorts of things to help them improve their revenue.

We’re not just building the best accounting software. That’s why we’ve been building this big team so that we can build things in parallel. As we finish the accounting software we have a whole lot of new things we want to push out into the market during calendar 2014.

...........

BoxFreeIT: Isn’t it hard to maintain focus with so many opportunities?

Drury:
Well we have lots of small teams. we have teams in Canberra, Auckland, Melbourne, Wellington, San Francisco, New York. But we’re still pretty lean.
We’re only 500 people servicing four major geographies. MYOB is 950 people servicing New Zealand and Australia. So we’re very efficient but we’re still sub-scale so we’re still growing.
For comparison, Intuit is 8,000 people and Sage is 13,000 people.


(Read the rest here)
http://boxfreeit.com.au/2013/08/12/xero-to-expand-platform-beyond-accounting-says-ceo/




Xero and Yodlee Unite Against Intuit

Posted by Sholto Macpherson on Wednesday, June 5, 2013 •

Cloud accounting company Xero and US financial data aggregator Yodlee have formed a partnership to tackle accounting services giant Intuit.

“The way we view this partnership is that we have the best of breed data platform, these guys (Xero) have the best of breed accounting technology, and together there’s a lot of mutual parties that have adverse interests that we are taking on together,”
said Joe Polverari, chief strategy and development officer for Yodlee.

............

“Better data plus better technology on the accounting side equals a better solution for accountants, bookkeepers and users equals a better market. That’s what’s happening, right?” he said.

Yodlee, which has relationships with thousands of banks and financial institutions, said it wasn’t introducing Xero to banks in the US.

“Right now we won’t, (Xero) are doing great on their own. Even though we have the world’s greatest bank relationships inside the US,” Poverari said.

http://boxfreeit.com.au/2013/06/05/xero-and-yodlee-unite-against-intuit/


About Sholto Macpherson

Sholto Macpherson is a business technology journalist specialising in cloud software. He lives and works in Sydney, Australia.