Financial software company, Intuit, is a significant provider of services to the small business market. With total revenues around $4 billion, the company offers products such as check processing, payroll services, personal and professional tax preparation tools, and accounting software. It’s a big business that automates important financial functions for small and mid-sized organizations.
Intuit’s customers rely on the company to provide core, mission-critical financial services. For this reason, Intuit is as much an enterprise technology company as Oracle or SAP. In recent years, the company migrated its products to the cloud, emphasizing service delivery over the Internet.
Migration challenges. For many enterprise vendors, migrating products from on-premise to the cloud involves a challenging mix of changes to technology, process, and business model. In Intuit’s case, with a broad product line that spans large organizations down to millions of consumers, many of these changes are particularly complex.
I spoke with Tayloe Stansbury, Intuit’s Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, to get a better sense of the company’s efforts to migrate its products to the cloud. Stansbury explained that Intuit has invested over $300 million during the last two years to consolidate data centers, upgrade hardware, and refresh its software applications. Inuit has used much of this investment to create a robust architecture and software as a service (SaaS) technology platform.
In addition to technology investment, however, Intuit has also focused on personnel and process. To minimize human error the company instituted a peer review board, consisting of architects and others, which must approve all software and hardware changes. In addition, the company evaluated staff, including both senior management and technical personnel, to “ensure that all groups possess sufficient experience with high-availability SaaS computing.”
Despite its massive upgrade and modernization program over the last 18 months, Intuit nonetheless suffered a series of outages that provoked the wrath of customers and served as a “wake-up call” inside the company, to use Stansbury’s term. These outages interfered with customers’ business operations and therefore harmed Intuit’s reputation.
When I discussed these outages with Intuit, the company emphasized that customer satisfaction is “in our DNA.” That said, the outages serve as an example of the difficulty associated with migrating a traditional software business to the Web.
