Intuit steps into CRM arena against Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Microsoft

Computerworld - Intuit Inc. is taking the philosophy that the best defense is a good offense.

Tired of seeing hosted CRM vendors such as Salesforce.com Inc., NetSuite Inc. and Microsoft Corp. (through its Dynamics CRM service) treat its 4 million QuickBooks users like low-hanging fruit to be plucked, Intuit is fighting back.

Intuit today said it will release a trio of Web-hosted CRM applications that will complement its QuickBooks Enterprise accounting software and compete against Salesforce.com, NetSuite and others.

Available in a month, the three applications include one that is mobile-enabled for field service representatives, another for warehouse management, and a third beta application for sales force automation that helps salespeople manage customer leads, said Angus Thomson, vice president and general manager of Intuit's midmarket group, in an interview.

The three software-as-a-service applications are part of its Intuit Enterprise suite, which Intuit showed at a QuickBooks Enterprise user conference in Dallas today.

Thomson declined to release the price for the apps, though he promised that "compared to other solutions, we should be between one-third to one-tenth the price when you consider total cost of ownership."

He also said Intuit "intends to solve many more jobs" by adding more components to the Enterprise suite.

China Martens, an analyst at The 451 Group, said Intuit's latest move into on-demand software is "all about holding on to existing customers and migrating them up the curve."

"Like Sage [Software, maker of Peachtree], Intuit has done very well at attracting large numbers of users at the low end," she wrote in an e-mail. "The question is whether they can retain them as those companies grow in size and their software needs expand."

Martens said NetSuite and Microsoft have both aggressively targeted QuickBooks' user base, which, according to Intuit, includes 4 million QuickBooks Pro and Premier users at 280,000 small businesses as well as the 57,000 companies using QuickBooks Enterprise.

By comparison, Salesforce.com claims 48,000 customer firms and NetSuite has 6,000, according to Martens.

"Our customer base is an order of magnitude larger," Thomson said.

Martens said Intuit's new apps could run the risk of competing with partners that had already built line-of-business apps leveraging QuickBooks Enterprise, for which Intuit also released Version 9.0 today.

The most important new feature in the on-premise software is the ability to handle multiple currencies in real time, which 40% of QuickBooks Enterprise customers had indicated a need for, Thomson said.