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Your Neighborhood Bank Becomes Your Trusted SaaS Provider

If you’re like me, you haven’t talked to a bank teller for years, in fact haven’t set foot inside a branch for a long time. Why should you? You do all your banking online. (?) But you probably wouldn’t think of your bank as *The* Software as a Service provider to run your entire small business…

That’s exactly what Fokus bank pulled off in Norway, in cooperation with 24SevenOffice and Bluegarden. The new, innovative bundle is probably the first of its kind in the World: single sign-on Web solution for your banking and all other business software needs. (hat tip: Espen Antonsen)

Let me reiterate: it’s not just online banking, but a full hosted business system. Given all the trouble I had just getting Quicken / Microsoft Money to work with several major US banks, I have a hard time imagining them come forward with such revolutionary offering. Key benefits to:

  • Customers
    • Trust, security. SaaS is not as widely accepted in Europe as in the US, and certainly the key issue is that flexible new products come from lesser known smaller providers, which SMB’s see as a major risk. Having the bank manage your data is a reassuring solution.
  • The Bank
    • Customer retention, in fact competitive advantage to attract businesses away from other banks. In a world when it’s easy to switch banks for the sake of higher interest, Fokus will have a virtual lock on its customers: that of convenience.
  • 24SevenOffice
    • Access to Fokus banks 200,000 customers; prospectively using it as a vehicle to penetrate the Danish Market since Fokus is owned by Danske Bank. Marketing/PR value of launching a “World First”

This is not the first innovative deal coming from 24SevenOffice: previously they teamed up with Telenor, a leading Scandinavian telco to create a 3G “Mobile Office“.

I’ve been following 24SevenOffice for quite a while (and have received occasional updates from Staale Risa, COO), largely due to my obsession with “Enterprise” functionality to small businesses. I can count on a single hand (two fingers?) the number of All-in-One SaaS providers with comparable breadth of functionality: CRM + ERP + Office .

My only wish is that the company entered the US market sooner. Recently they launched an International version, accessible to US customers, but frankly, that’s about the one thing coming from 24SevenOffice that I am unimpressed with. It removes the key value proposition of being a full-rounded, integrated solution ( a’la NetSuite but more) and positions the system as a lower-cost CRM competing head-on with SalesForce.com. Well, I have news for my European friends: this version does not compete with Salesforce, but with the dozens of other challengers. Personally, I think it’s a marketing blunder.

That said I know the company is working on porting their full system (think accounting, HR ..etc) to US requirements and a full blown US launch is in the works …. stay tuned.

Update (9/8): To access the full 24SevenOffice site, trick the system by selecting a European country, e.g. the UK. You still have to do some digging, a lot of logistic functions are hidden under Financials.
There’s also a neat demo here.


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Pre-AJAX AJAX Applications

OK, so this title does not make a lot of sense … I’ll explain:
There’s a lot of hype around AJAX ( Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), which, in laymen’s terms is a set of technologies that allow web applications to have the look’n feel (and speed!) of desktop applications.

Traditional “web behavior” has been one of the main reasons for user reluctance against hosted Enterprise Applications, and innovative companies have come up with AJAX-style solutions for quite a while. Norway-based 24SevenOffice, a provider of hosted, modular All-In-One applications (ERP, CRM, email, calendar ..etc) has had an AJAX-like UI for a year and a half or so. Of course the term AJAX did not exist, so they had to explain at length the benefits of a faster, friendlier, easier-to-use Web Application.

It took a brand like Google, and the gliding-sliding oh-so-beautiful and fast Google Maps for AJAX to become a “household” name and one of the hot IT trends this year. Now longer do we need the long explanation, AJAX is chic du jour, all new web apps have it, and the major hosted Enterprise App’s also go the AJAX way: see NetSuite’s announcement. They claim to be first major business application with broad support of AJAX, but as stated above, they are a little late to the party… Late or not, it’s nice to see mainstream adoption and friendlier Web-apps finally.

For more technical info, as well as a good compilation of reference material, check out Rasmus’ 30 second tutorial. (via Jeff Nolan).