Alex Barnett blog : APIs, webservices, Intuit

Connecting Clouds: Intuit Partner Platform and Windows Azure

alexbarnett — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:33:00 GMT

How about I break my blogging “hiatus” by sharing some cool stuff the Intuit Partner Platform team has been working on for a little while that involves Windows Azure?

OK, then… :-)

This morning, Intuit and Microsoft have announced very cool news for Intuit and Microsoft developers and for Small Businesses…

From the IPP team blog post, Alex Chriss, Director of IPP (er…my boss):

“Today, we’re thrilled to announce an alliance between Intuit and Microsoft that brings IPP a giant step closer to our ecosystem vision. Starting today, SaaS developers can access the beta of the Windows Azure SDK for IPP - a set of tools, code samples, and services, designed to make it easy for developers of SaaS applications developed on Windows Azure to federate those SaaS apps on to IPP and sell them to millions of Small Businesses in the Intuit Workplace App Center.”

Connecting these two clouds has been fun and it’s just the start…the bits we’re releasing today is a beta…but fully functional: it provides everything an Azure developer needs to federate their apps on to IPP. In the v1.0 release of the Windows Azure SDK for IPP (expected to launch sometime in February) will also include built-in support for IPP’s Intuit Data Services, the web API that allows those SaaS apps to fully integrate with QuickBooks customer data and program against the common data model and cloud repository that all Intuit Workplace App Center leverage…this is how the SaaS apps from different vendors as well as Intuit’s SaaS offerings work together at the data level.

So the developer story is pretty awesome.

The other aspect to the news released this morning is about the plan to federate Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS) on to IPP and become one of the great set of apps available on Intuit Workplace App Center. BPOS includes a set of messaging and collaboration solutions hosted by Microsoft, and consists of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online.

I recorded a short interview with Jeff Collins, Group Architect for IPP, and Jarred Keneally, Developer Support Engineer to talk about what’s in the SDK and what’s coming soon. Enjoy!

Some more info links:

Official Press Release at Microsoft.com
IPP Team blog post: Intuit Partner Platform + Windows Azure = Win for Small Businesses
IPP Dev Center – Windows Azure SDK for IPP
Intuit Workplace App Center

Update - some reactions to the news coming in now:

Dennis Howlett - ZDNet - Intuit and Microsoft partner: more PaaS to put in your aaS environment

My take: Intuit is joining a growing band of apps vendors that see PaaS as a way of delivering all sorts of aaS functionality, expanding its reach, developing deep domain expertise and helping it accelerate growth. These are bold ambitions and fit well with the idea that a single cloud platform should provide the ecosystem framework needed to achieve these goals. There is no reason why the SMB market should not benefit from these initiatives so at this level it is good to see both Microsoft and Intuit step up to the plate of opening up access to a large group of developers.

Ben Kepes - CloudAve - Intuit and Microsoft Sign Deal to Serve SMBs

"This really is massive news for anyone involved in small or medium business – be it as a business themselves or in anyway selling technology products or services to SMBs....APIs are great – wonderfully valuable things that allow applications to work together. But a common data model of the sort that the IPP is built around, is even better, allowing applications to be built from the start around an underlying and consistent model of data."

Sam Diaz - Between The Lines - Microsoft and Intuit become cloud partners

"The idea, of course, is to link Microsoft’s business applications to the financial data that’s found within Quickbooks to help businesses operate more efficiently. For months, Intuit has been working to push the cloud and open its arms to developers....In July, Intuit launched an open-source community where users could share information to enhance the apps on Intuit’s platform. Prior to that, the company announced Federated Applications, which allows developers to use any programming language, host those apps on any cloud infrastructure and connect them to Intuit’s platform, marketing them to business customers who use Intuit products."

Mary Jo Foley - Microsoft partners with Intuit to shore up Redmond's small-business cloud play

“Customers don’t want a one-point small-business solution. They want a whole suite,” said Walid Abu-Hadba, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of the Developer & Platform Evangelism. He said that this kind of partnership with Intuit was an example of how Microsoft plans to address the needs of small-business developers and customers.”

Dave Rosenberg, CNET,

“According to Alex Chriss, director of IPP, the technology took just a few months to build because the strategy was already aligned. The integration is based on a common data model that is an extension of Quickbooks data. The data model lives in the cloud and developers are able to use the SDK to integrate between the desktop, cloud, and other applications in the ecosystem…For well over a year I've been suggesting that Microsoft needs to take advantage of it's massive developer base to make any real progress with Azure. While this deal with Intuit is still a bit of a baby step, there are many other applications, both online and off, that could use Azure for a variety of purposes. This bodes well not just for Microsoft but for the cloud in general.”

The Microsoft Blog - Microsoft, Intuit team up to encourage cloud apps

“Azure is Microsoft's new platform as a service (PaaS) offering, designed to automatically manage and scale applications hosted on Microsoft's public cloud. Fueled by Microsoft's vast network of partners familiar with its programming languages, Azure will compete against similar offerings such as Google App Engine and Force.com.”

Oh...and we made techmeme :-)

More...

Phil Wainewright - Why Microsoft and Intuit need each other's clouds

“Cloud platforms share many of the ingredients of conventional software platforms, but they add several crucial new ingredients. One thing that hasn’t changed is the need to build momentum among developers and customers for the platform. Intuit and Microsoft have plenty of both, which guarantees attention for what they’ve announced today. But the tie-up between these two giants is important too for the light it shines on the special characteristics of cloud platforms and how they change the game in so many ways for ISVs, developers and platform vendors…

...the link-up combines Microsoft’s strengths in developer tools and functional scope with Intuit’s advanced skills and investment in service delivery on IPP”

Federated Apps on the Intuit Partner Platform

alexbarnett — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 13:52:00 GMT

So what have I been working on since joining Intuit? A bunch of stuff, but something I wanted to shout about is the release of “Federated Applications” on the Intuit Partner Platform.

Working closely with five new developers to Intuit's Platform as a Service (PaaS), VerticalResponse, DimDim, Rypple, Setster, and ExpenseWare, we've got some kick-ass apps federated into the platform.

Some nice coverage so far this morning, including:

Ben Kepes, CloudAve Intuit Launches the IPP Version 2

"After the briefing I have to say that it looks to me like IPP is finally offering to fulfil the promise of the end-to-end integrated small business software platform that I’ve been evangelising for a few years now – my catch cry of late has been that application integration should only be seen as the very first step in building a SaaS ecosystem. Much more important is the aggregation of applications. This may be data aggregation, UI aggregation, sign-on integration or billing integration – and ideally users and vendors would determine what parts of the integration they bought into."

Leena Rao at TechCrunch - Intuit’s Partner Platform Goes Multilingual With Federated Apps

“The “Federated Applications” functionality lets developers who have existing SaaS applications that are built with any programming language, database or cloud computing platform publish their apps on Intuit Marketplace. Applications won’t have to be rewritten to conform to QuickBooks but will instead go through a minor configuration process.”

Phil Wainewright, ZDNet: Intuit makes two-pronged PaaS and SaaS push

“The significant element of Intuit’s PaaS announcement is that it is a land-grab to capture mindshare among developers on other cloud platforms, who can take their AppEngine, Amazon Web Services or self-hosted applications and make them available using Intuit’s single sign-on, billing and QuickBooks integration infrastructure. Market reach being one of the key attributes developers look for in a new platform, perhaps the most appealing factor is that applications will be showcased within the Intuit Marketplace, with a potential reach to the four-million-strong installed base of QuickBooks accounting software customers and their estimated 25 million employees.”

What I've found very cool about this new Federated Apps capability for IPP is that fact that these different SaaS apps are developed on a variety of stacks and hosted outside of the IPP platform.. One of the apps is built on Java. Another is built enirely on .NET. Another is a mix of RoR and LAMP. Another built of Flex (on their own hosting environment - not IPP). If an app was running on EC2, that would work too, as would an app built on Google's AppEngine. It doen't matter - the integration points for Federated Apps are just that and pretty lightweight (one of the partners was able to turnaround the work with 1 developer in less than two weeks, including time for the technical review of the app). We made a deliberate decision to make IPP agnostic to the technology that developers want to use. Yes, we have a "native" stack also, but the options we are providing developers now means there is no technology lock-in to speak of.

Here is some more information on the details of federation and how you as a developer can get started.

Oh, and a quick plug on the talk I'll be giving on how to federate applications to IPP at the Startups and the Cloud event next week in the Boston area.

Joining Intuit

alexbarnett — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:02:00 GMT

Firstly - thanks to everyone who has reached out to me in the last three weeks via email, phone calls and comments since I shared the news of my pursuit for the next adventure - I have really appreciated everyone's support and interest in my next steps.

The great news is I'll be joining Intuit as a Group Manager working in a fast growing start-up team responsible for leading the Intuit Partner Platform. Below is a snippet and some links to blog posts and articles that should give you a fairly good idea about where my focus will be a week from now.

Although I'll be working from the Orem office (Utah) to start off with, the plan is to ultimately move to the greater Boston area - another new adventure. I've visited Boston three times in the last year or so and have loved it more and more with each visit, so watch out Boston!

This is a fantastic opportunity for me personally - the team has ambitious goals and an amazing set of existing assets to leverage (see some of the numbers below) in becoming a significant player in the cloud computing space. I look forward to sharing stories of my new journey with you.

Intuit Partner Platform Opens to Developers (Sept 15 2008)

"The Intuit Partner Platform not only gives developers the opportunity to build Web-based applications, but successful SaaS businesses by taking the complexity out of managing infrastructure, hosting, user management, integration and billing. Now developers can focus on developing innovative on-demand software solutions that solve unique and important problems for the four million small and mid-market businesses across the U.S. that use QuickBooks and the 25 million employees that work in those companies.

The platform-as-a-service offering allows developers to combine the powerful open source Flex framework and Adobe Flex Builder and the proven database of Intuit QuickBase to build rich Internet applications that work with QuickBooks data. They can also leverage Adobe AIR to provide additional desktop-like functionality in their applications, such as pop-up notifications, local file system access, local data storage, and the ability to create a fully branded user experience.

"We have now accepted more than 1,000 developers into the program and it is exciting to hear their ideas and energy about what they want to build," said Alex Chriss, business leader for the Intuit Partner Platform. "Customers will benefit greatly from the imagination and expertise that developers use to solve problems facing their specific industries." "

Web 2.0 Expo NYC - Intuit Connected Services (Sept 19 2008)
Intuit Makes SaaS Play Guns For Salesforce (Sept 18 2008)
Intuit’s flexy PaaS (Aug 14 2008)
Intuit enters the PaaS wars (April 28 2008)
Intuit’s Radical New Flex + QuickBase Cloud Platform (April 16 2008)