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Intuit Expands Development Platform, Brings Cloud Apps to Millions of Small Businesses

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Intuit Expands Development Platform, Brings Cloud Apps to Millions of Small Businesses
In 2009, Intuit launched the Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) to help developers build software-as-a-service applications that integrate with data in QuickBooks—the popular financial software. In 2010, to make it easier for IPP developers to create scalable cloud-based applications, Intuit combined IPP with the capabilities of Windows Azure in a partnership with Microsoft. The company also released the Windows Azure Software Development Kit for the Intuit Partner Platform. Now, developers quickly produce applications using the familiar technology of the Windows Azure environment and market them to millions of customers through the Intuit App Center. Customers benefit from one-stop shopping for an increasing selection of applications—soon including the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite—that can be combined to create end-to-end solutions.

Situation
Founded in 1983, Intuit is a leading provider of business and financial management solutions for small and midsize businesses; financial institutions, including banks and credit unions; consumers; and accounting professionals. Its flagship products and services, including QuickBooks, Quicken, and TurboTax, simplify small business management and payroll processing, personal finance, and tax preparation and filing. The company has a growing worldwide user base of 50 million.

In recent years, Intuit has focused on using emerging cloud computing technologies to help businesses operate more efficiently. In 2008, Intuit unveiled its Connected Services strategy—a collection of online services that support delivering software as a service (SaaS), accessing data in its QuickBooks products, and connecting users to each other within the Intuit small business network. To promote this strategy, the company also introduced the Intuit Partner Platform (IPP). IPP is a set of technologies, services, tools, and other resources that developers can use to quickly and easily build their own SaaS applications (or “federate” existing applications) that are capable of integrating QuickBooks data. The developers can then sell their applications to potentially millions of small-business customers through the Intuit App Center. Customers can choose from a wide range of applications that work with QuickBooks data and are customized for a variety of industry verticals to purchase.

What’s most exciting about bringing Windows Azure into the Intuit Partner Platform is that developers now have a best-in-class ‘platform as a service’ to both build applications and deliver them to market.

Alex Chriss
Director, Intuit Partner Platform, Intuit

“Intuit is increasingly becoming a cloud-based company,” says Alex Chriss, Director, Intuit Partner Platform at Intuit. “This year, 50 percent of our revenue will come from Connected Services. As we look into the future, we see the increased importance of delivering more cloud-based offerings and making them available to a variety of different connected devices.”

Intuit wanted to help third-party developers easily create highly scalable applications and services in the cloud, without a lot of programming or an extensive IT infrastructure to maintain. The company wanted the solution to be standardized on a single, familiar platform to simplify the development process and increase the interoperability of applications developed by multiple vendors. The solution would need to be able to scale to meet large traffic bursts and be affordable, secure, and easy to manage. Intuit also wanted to expand the role of its App Center as a central, comprehensive, convenient destination for customers as they select solutions. Finally, Intuit wanted to improve overall service by taking its Microsoft Alliance Partnership to the next level.

Solution
In late 2009, Intuit chose to work with Microsoft to combine IPP with the flexibility, reliability, and scalability of Windows Azure. Windows Azure serves as a preferred platform for the development, service-hosting, and service-management environment for third-party applications. It provides developers with on-demand computing and storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers. Other key components of the platform include Microsoft SQL Azure, to simplify provisioning and deployment of multiple relational databases, and capabilities to help developers connect applications and services in the cloud or on-premises. Development work for the project was performed using the Microsoft .NET Framework and the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition development system.
On January 20, 2010, after testing to ensure compatibility of the two companies’ platform services, Intuit officially named Windows Azure as a standard preferred platform for small-business cloud application development. The company also released a beta version of the Windows Azure Software Development Kit for the Intuit Partner Platform (Windows Azure SDK for IPP). The general availability release of the SDK was on April 6, 2010. “We chose Windows Azure because Microsoft is a clear leader in cloud computing,” says Jeff Collins, Architect, Intuit Partner Platform at Intuit. He added that another important reason for choosing Windows Azure as a preferred cloud platform was the ability to provide complete end-to end offerings to the Intuit community of nearly 90,000 registered Intuit Developer Network members, each with unique programming backgrounds and abilities.

Intuit also announced that, later in 2010, its Intuit App Center would offer the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite, including Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft Office Live Meeting, and Microsoft Office Communications Online. “The Business Productivity Online Standard Suite offers best-in-class solutions for productivity, communication, and collaboration

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