A great time for new businesses?

I like to keep an eye on the blogs of a few business analysts and commentators to try to keep a some sort of perspective on the industry I’m in. It’s easy to be so caught up in it sometimes that you don’t see the wood for the trees.

I’m a relative new comer to the exciting (honestly, it is) world of business and certainly haven’t run a business through a recession before – so I’m keen to absorb as much info from the more experienced hands as possible.

One of the blogs I follow closely is Richard Holways UKHotViews. I remember quoting Richard in my first business plan as he was one of the first to predict the growth of cloud computing (or the ASP model as it was called back then).

A post on UKHotViews that caught my eye this morning was A great time for new businesses (a title he stole from an FT article and I in turn have stolen from him).

The gist of it is that he thinks that new tech businesses, and specifically cloud computing will do well in hard times. The reasoning being that the industry big guns are so distracted by the need to reduce their outgoings (and headcount) and protect their existing revenues that they don’t spend time and money on innovation.

That sounds good to me.

KashFlow and our fellow cloud computing start-ups in the accounting software industry  have been slowly but surely chipping away at the customer base of companies like Sage, Intuit (Quickbooks) and the like for some time now. The speed at which we are taking away their customers is starting to gather pace. Beating them in industry software awardshelps of course : ) Plus we tend to attract a lot new businesses. So not only are we taking away existing customers – we’re also decreasing the supply of new ones.

Long may it continue.

Tags: Cloud Computing, Quickbooks, Recession, Sage

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Cloud Computing / SaaS, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.