Small to Medium Businesses
You hear the phrase "Small to Medium Businesses" used a lot when people are talking about software and services in this field. It is used to describe businesses that do not fall into the category of "large businesses", businesses that have there own IT departments and budgets and all the bureaucracy that goes with it. However, the phrase "small to medium businesses" really downplays the great variety of businesses that are under the umbrella that moniker covers. The gamut runs from single man shops to multi-million dollar companies with hundreds of employees.
In the financial management software world anything above personal finance software fits into the category of small to medium business software. The reining king in this space is Quickbooks. On their website they proclaim themselves to be the #1 Small Business Financial Software and they really are. You see Quickbooks everywhere. But at a certain point Quickbooks falls down. I think the point where Quickbooks really doesn't work anymore is when you start needing to access your financial software from multiple computers across the network by multiple individuals. Quickbooks really only works when there is one primary person running all of the finances in a company.
When you get to the level of multiuser, multi-computer financial management software you start to see some truly awful software packages. Text-based and menu-based software running on Novell or Linux is very common in this arena. And not only is the interface horrible, it often requires the user to jump through hoops to accomplish what should be a simple task. For some reason software in this realm is allowed to remain in the dark ages as far as advancements in computer science go. Not only that, the price point jumps dramatically from say $3,000 to upwards of $50,000.
A lot of that is driven by specialized needs. People put up with the crappiness because they need certain features that just aren't widely available. Also network software is hard, it requires integrating a lot of different pieces of software and hardware together. Regardless, this is the void that Geebis hopes to fill. One of the biggest strengths of Geebis is that it can easily be extended over the network and be used multiple people simultaneously. At the same time it can be used by a single person easily. The decision to make Geebis web-based was so critical in reaching this goal. No special client software is needed other than a web browser and that makes all the difference.
In the financial management software world anything above personal finance software fits into the category of small to medium business software. The reining king in this space is Quickbooks. On their website they proclaim themselves to be the #1 Small Business Financial Software and they really are. You see Quickbooks everywhere. But at a certain point Quickbooks falls down. I think the point where Quickbooks really doesn't work anymore is when you start needing to access your financial software from multiple computers across the network by multiple individuals. Quickbooks really only works when there is one primary person running all of the finances in a company.
When you get to the level of multiuser, multi-computer financial management software you start to see some truly awful software packages. Text-based and menu-based software running on Novell or Linux is very common in this arena. And not only is the interface horrible, it often requires the user to jump through hoops to accomplish what should be a simple task. For some reason software in this realm is allowed to remain in the dark ages as far as advancements in computer science go. Not only that, the price point jumps dramatically from say $3,000 to upwards of $50,000.
A lot of that is driven by specialized needs. People put up with the crappiness because they need certain features that just aren't widely available. Also network software is hard, it requires integrating a lot of different pieces of software and hardware together. Regardless, this is the void that Geebis hopes to fill. One of the biggest strengths of Geebis is that it can easily be extended over the network and be used multiple people simultaneously. At the same time it can be used by a single person easily. The decision to make Geebis web-based was so critical in reaching this goal. No special client software is needed other than a web browser and that makes all the difference.
posted by John at
7:25 AM
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