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Re: KashFlow implies insecurity among SaaS finance solutions using Yodlee

Kofi — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 03:13:00 -0000

Very good article and very lethahy debate.

I would like to take different approach to explain why multi-tenancy is much more than just a DB Architecture .I believe that multi-tenancy is a technology answer to the economic problem SaaS business model faces. “Cost to serve customers” is an extremely crucial metric in building SaaS business. Cost to serve can save or sink SaaS business. In order to meet the demands of the lower Cost to Serve (customers)…. Organization needs to minimize costs involved in Operations, Hardware, and Software in serving customers.

Only way to achieve this is to make sure that each of these resources are scaled and shared across customers thus helping reduce overall cost(to serve) per customers…..Operations Costs: When it comes to reducing operations costs, one needs to consider….Are there processes and procedures which allow ease of management?: Metadata change management/propagation (Orchestration). Is there Central point of control for management (monitoring/correction etc…)?Are there ways to upgrade customers in one fell swoop? Are all customers on the same version of software?How many points of failures are there in the overall deployment, are these failure points across all tenants or are they “on a per tenant” basis? (This could make or break support for SLA. Some one in this discussion recommended creating virtualized environment(Virtual machines) and deploying same package of software to reduce costs… but this will increase operations costs if not done properly(as many points of failures in operations as there are virtual machines) and would make it impossible to meet SLA’s)IS there enough tooling in the architecture to allow for monitoring/measuring performance of all components centrally as well as on exception basis? (This will directly dictate operations personnel cost and what kind of SLA you can provide)Same consideration goes for hardware and software. Just making database shared across tenants in neither going to reduce software cost nor it is going to scale the hardware infrastructure for several thousand tenants.

Only way, is to make sure that almost entire software stack is shared across multiple tenants (UI, Authentication/Authorization mechanisms, Process flows/Process controls, Error handling mechanism, Provisioning, billing etc…) resulting in desired cost/performance scalabilities.There are other aspects involved in SaaS business from the end user prospective.

End users expect to get started with minimal intervention from the vendor providing services… this calls for additional software/application features such as easy UI, integrated billing system, integrated self learning systems in place. This requires for a separate tooling of application stack which is not a must have for on-premise or traditional application stacks.In summary… it is really about Costs, Scalability, SLA for running a SaaS business which dictates the multi-tenancy architecture.

Vish Agashe

Re: Why the SAP BusinessOne multi-tenancy discussion matters

admin — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 01:55:00 -0000

I very specifically asked Jonathan Becher if B1OD means running multiple databases - he said each customer has its own database. You are saying something very different. I'm happy to hear what that is about. Like you I will be traveling through the end of the month. What was particularly confusing is that the multi-tenancy aspect was not addressed in the PR, automatically raising concerns.

Re: Why the SAP BusinessOne multi-tenancy discussion matters

rduffy — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 00:59:11 -0000

Hi Dennis

When I return to a location with better coverage than the Marlborough Sound I will put together a full post to see if I can provide more clarity and I will actually record a full end to end demo for everyone to watch where I will show you how we address the issue of multitenancy with SAP Business One.

I am always a believer in show and tell as I think it's an easier way to explain how we do the multitenancy piece with SAP Business One.

Our Cloud Control Centre, which we specifically built for for the hosting providers and multitenancy provisioners actually addresses each of the points that both you and @fscavo addressed which the ability to host multiple companies securely from a single database instance and a single instance of the application code. I'll take you through he SAP Business One architecture as well and explain in detail how we manage the multitenancy and deliver the scalability that hosters want in order to drive down the infrastructure costs.

Our SAP Labs team in China have also done a great job of giving providers the ability to offer one or more Software Solution Partner (ISV) apps in this environment.

I have been working with the architecture in its current form (that we call Wave 1) and that's what I will focus on when I build the demo video walk though for you but I will also talk about more of the things we'll be covering in our Wave 2 release.

I'd love to do it now but I am on leave hiking the Queen Charlotte Track in the Marlborough region of New Zealand for the next 2 weeks so I'll knock it over for you as soon as I get back.
In case anyone cares here's a pic from where I am writing this -http://pic.twitter.com/C4y9EjG...

Re: Why the SAP BusinessOne multi-tenancy discussion matters

DenisPombriant — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 21:40:35 -0000

Well said. Multitenancy matters for lots of reasons, but I have always believed the economics alone would be enough to move us in that direction. BTW, I think Oracle saw that too and the company's latest hardware seems well suited to centralized multitenant systems that support millions of users. The world is now moving in that direction, retrograde motion in the direction of what Benioff calls the "false cloud" are efforts by some vendors to stay somewhat current with solutions that were architected for another era and customers from that era too. There are still many of them out there.

Re: Workday recasts the chart of accounts as sexy

rayskyy — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 15:37:19 -0000

In my experience tags are really a product of more modern ERP and their easier approach. Using generated accounting codes based on segment definitions is very 90's. That whole idea makes things (from a GL standpoint) very complex and inflexible since these have to be defined up front - essentially predicting the future.

Tags work well and if structured and validated right - do not create an allocation issue. It does create maximum flexibility of course and makes reporting a breeze.

Actually - this is one way you can tell whether the ERP SaaS product is fake SaaS or not - because no one in their right mind would do a segmented (or coded) GL structure today. :-)

Re: The multi-currency imperative for SME

greg_not_so — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 01:05:41 -0000

@dahowlett Konsolidierungswaehrung is group currency (30) and scaling deals with rounding, which you can't avoid when 'translating'. they are both baked into the F.01 transaction which is the trial balance in R/3>ECC>BS>HANA>tbd....

Re: The multi-currency imperative for SME

dahowlett — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 00:10:56 -0000

@greg_not_so @Greg - you arse - according to Babelfish this says:

If scaling and consolidation currency were selected * become the amounts in the parameter the ' Konsolidierungswaehrung' * selected currency in accordance with scaling spent.

Right...clear as fugly mud

Re: The multi-currency imperative for SME

greg_not_so — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 00:06:09 -0000

who would want to change this?

*   Wenn Skalierung und Konsolidierungswaehrung gewaehlt wurde
*   werden die Betraege in der im Parameter 'Konsolidierungswaehrung'
*   gewaehlten Waehrung gemaess Skalierung ausgegeben.

Re: The multi-currency imperative for SME

dahowlett — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 21:56:13 -0000

@garyturner you're missing my point methinks. Sage numbers may be as you suggest but their revenue share is way more than current cloud/SaaS providers can garner.

I can give you companies that have handfuls of customers by that reckoning that are already looking at forward revs of $200-300 million.

Re: The multi-currency imperative for SME

dahowlett — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 21:53:49 -0000

@Michael_Wood I need multiple 'base' currencies - but then so do the accounting packages

Re: The multi-currency imperative for SME

Michael_Wood — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 21:27:53 -0000

Dennis - Hi - Michael from Receipt Bank here.

Very interesting post.

In Receipt Bank we store all transactions in both their original currency and, as you say, a base currency. All data can then be exported to bookkeeping software either in its native currencies or in the base currency (depending on what is allowed by the bookkeeping software).

We have a number of additional features already planned to further improve our multi-currency capabilities, but any suggestions you have for what a solution such as ours could/should be offering would be very welcome.

Re: The multi-currency imperative for SME

garyturner — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 21:03:46 -0000

Dennis - a (well) educated guess is that Sage Instant and Sage 50 have around 150k customers each, give or take 20-30k. So, it's arguable that circa 300k out of a pessimistic 1-1.5M is a fair chunk after 30 years in market.

The fact that Sage is comprised of probably 100+ global (indigenous) products is a function of the native origins of software development in the 1980's before the web emerged. Both the geographical redundancy and the platform redundancy brought about by the emergence of the web both draw into question the sense of replicating the land-locked go-to-market strategies of the 1980's, even if it is justifiable on the ground of being easier to achieve. The fact is no new market entrant would build discrete, separate web based products for different countries to replicate history, so the inverse assumption is interesting; why would a web based vendor limit their market to a single country.

Re: Workday recasts the chart of accounts as sexy

tconnolly — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 12:12:06 -0000

I agree wholeheartedly with you on this Dennis. I have often felt the use of the Chart of Accounts to represent the basis for all analysis of business results as being hugely restrictive and limiting in terms of ability to amend as an organisation develops and grows. Any structural changes require a major revamp of the General Ledger and usually means all comparatives are lost as a whole new Chart of Accounts needs to be implemented.

This is why we designed a separate user definable business analysis structure to augment the Chart of Accounts in accountsIQ (www.accountsiq.com), You can start with a simple Chart of Accounts and build the analysis structure as the business develops. You can also amend the analysis code structure and start coding new period transactions to the new structure without changing the Chart of Accounts or the historical figures attached to that Chart of Accounts. Linking history from the previous analysis structure is also possible.

Flexibility is the key as organisations develop and change. You need to be able to decide which GL codes you want to analyse further so you can gradually build it over time to cover revenues initially, then direct costs and then more and more costs that can be apportioned appropriately. The other clear advantage is not needing to create a tonne of GL codes with all the possible combinations of GL accounts and analysis codes. Combinations are created either by setting up a budget for the combination, or coding a relevant transaction to the combination, unless you decide to restrict users from coding to combinations that do not have a budget.

Flexibility in designing the analysis structure is paramount allowing top-down (ie: define the analysis elements you need and then auto creating relevant code/tag combinations of those elements) or bottom up (ie: create the tags and point them to the analysis elements to which they relate). This allows for easier reporting. It is also critical in using an analysis structure in consolidated results for a group that some element of control over analysis structures can be imposed at group level, while also allowing for groups with disparate activities that require their own analysis structure.

Re: Workday recasts the chart of accounts as sexy

greg_not_so — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:33:39 -0000

@SAP_Jarret not clear about 'code block', but (XBRL) tags are here to stay

Re: KashFlow gets the channel conflict blues

dahowlett — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:17:07 -0000

@willfarnell That's fair enough Will. Models for both s/w vendors and professionals will morph, bend, twist and change. What SaaS/cloud has done is open up opportunities to get inventive about those models but that hasn't necessarily meant the models are static - as they were BC (Before Cloud.)

Part of the problem has arisen because KF structured all sorts of deals upon which (some) firms not unreasonably built out models they thought would hold water for a reasonable period of time. Advertising a price was part of their go to market. Again not unreasonable.

It strikes me that what has happened is exposing business model weaknesses across multiple dimensions. We'll just have to wait and see how it all pans out.

Re: Feature requests for FreeAgent

dialm4accounts — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:05:44 -0000

@dahowlett If you're a thicko, Dennis, then heaven help the rest of us :-)
Thanks, glad that's clear!
M

Re: Feature requests for FreeAgent

dahowlett — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:04:48 -0000

@dialm4accounts ....aaaah - now it does. Maybe next time make the distinction clearer for thickos like me.

Re: Workday recasts the chart of accounts as sexy

dahowlett — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:03:06 -0000

@anwenrobinson - in the WD world, there is no need for balance tables as such and you can do the whole thing while 'in flight' - very little by way of hierarchy needed although at the back end and hidden away from the user, WD does that heavy lifting in order to present the info needed. This presents other challenges but that's a different topic.

Re: KashFlow gets the channel conflict blues

willfarnell — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:02:36 -0000

@dahowlett I appreciate that the change is not affecting me in the way you set out in your piece but to an extent this is because I am not letting it. I do offer bundled packages, all my client pay me a fixed fee which includes access to KashFlow, I pay the fee to KF. What I dont do is advertise a fixed price as I do not believe one solution fits all. I am simply taking a pragmatic view of my pricing if a client comes to me and they are an exisiting KF customer. A pragmatic approach is central to our way of doing business as I am sure you will recall from our discussion at KF HQ back in the summer.

Re: Feature requests for FreeAgent

dialm4accounts — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:01:03 -0000

@dahowlett You can do one of two things:
1) Create a PDF (by clicking Save PDF) which you can then save on your computer and send using a separate e-mail programme.
2) (quicker), Click Send by E-mail which automatically creates a PDF of the invoice and sends it from within FreeAgent.
You can also send invoices (as PDFs) automatically.
Make sense?
M

Re: Crunch adds HMRC compliant reporting but…

Jon Norris — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:20:29 -0000

@dahowlett We've been wondering that internally too. As our service isn't pure SaaS we don't think there's too much danger as, like you say, ordinary customers have a hard time understanding these reports, so the demand for accountants remains.

Re: Feature requests for FreeAgent

dahowlett — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:19:11 -0000

@dialm4accounts 1. right - I was hoping that only accounts with open items show up.

2. that's fine then. I was slightly confused, assuming that you step outside FreeAgent to get the PDF sent on the basis of what I heard.

Re: Crunch adds HMRC compliant reporting but…

dahowlett — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 12:58:13 -0000

@OneAccounting You are correct, which is why I have been yelling at the profession since 2005 - get your act together in terms of service delivery above and beyond compliance or you get squeezed right out of the picture. It is developments like this, which, if successful, disrupt the profession and will attract a LOT of interest. Curiously, I wonder the extent to which Crunch ends up cannibalising itself in the process.

Re: Feature requests for FreeAgent

dialm4accounts — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 12:58:00 -0000

@dahowlett 1. Yes you can but you will also see any other active customers / suppliers who don't have open items.
2. Yes, you can do both (admittedly not at the same time, it's one click to save the .pdf and another to send the invoice).
M