Webware

Intuit is announcing today its entry into the growing app platform market. Like Salesforce has done, Intuit's new QuickBase Developer Program will let developers create and sell add-on Web apps that tap into the company's core product: QuickBooks. And like Salesforce, Intuit will market these third-party apps directly to its customers via a promotional channel in the core app. Intuit will go after the small-business market with the program, leaving the enterprise space for Salesforce--even though both companies have customers in the other's main market.

Intuit claims an addressable market of 3.6 million companies that use QuickBooks.

Other players in this space include Google and Amazon. However, their platforms don't come with large audiences of customers already familiar with their back-office business apps.

The QuickBase Developer Program has important elements. First, it gives the Intuit Web database access to data from customers' QuickBooks installations. Most of Intuit's business customers use the QuickBooks installed software, not the online version. The QDP is for Web apps, though: It links apps to data resident on customers' PCs.

A Flash app accessing QuickBooks data, thanks to QDP

QDP apps will be presented in Flex, which has the big advantage of running everywhere (and making it easy to create very pretty applications). However, since QDP apps are targeted primarily at QuickBooks users, and nearly all of them are on Windows, the cross-platform angle isn't that important. The fact that there are a lot of Flex developers is, though.

One of the QDP's slickest pieces is financial. Intuit will handle the billing for QDP apps on the part of developers. That saves them from having to hassle with collecting from their customers. Also, resources for QDP apps, all of which will be hosted by Intuit, will be charged for in a pay-as-you-go system, like Amazon Web Services. That makes QDP apps economically scalable.

The program goes into limited beta on Thursday. Version 1 should open up to all developers this summer.

Per my previous rant on Web start-ups that lack a Big Idea, here's one I appreciate, since it's trying to solve a real problem: NetBooks. This company has built a Web-based suite of interconnected apps designed to run a small business.

It's a noble effort, because the small-business market is murder. It's not that there's a lack of customers, it's just that they are so hard to reach and so different from each other. Building a universal small-biz app is a tricky balancing act.

It looks to me like NetBooks might eventually pull it off, although I'd wait for a Version 2 before I'd recommend the service to my friends who run their own small businesses.

NetBooks: Not exciting, but useful.

In the functions and features department, NetBooks is off to a strong start. If your business fits into the NetBooks target space (product-based businesses, not consultancies), you'll find a rich collection of databases and business logic to manage customers, inventory, shipping, and bookkeeping. For my own demo, I worked a sales order through picking, shipping, and billing. The application correctly moved items from inventory, created shipping labels, an invoice, and so on.

But while CEO Ridgely Evers pitched me on NetBooks as a "complete business operating system," some core functions, such as payroll and e-mail list management, are handled through partnerships (PayCycle and Vertical Response, respectively). Integration with these critical functions seems to be lacking.

And while I'm a big proponent of Web-based applications for workgroups, in NetBooks' case the reliance on the Web doesn't do the application favors. While the architecture guarantees that everyone using it is working on the same data and can get to it from anywhere, the NetBooks UI is archaic: Screens are filled with tiny text and selection boxes, and many rely on drab and uniform tabs for additional info. Navigating from screen to screen is slow. This app needs a UI refresh.

Pretty much everything you need is on the NetBooks screens, but the UI could be more contemporary.

The big difference between NetBooks and QuickBooks Online Edition is that NetBooks is designed to serve all parts of a business, not just bookkeepers. There are lightweight CRM forms in NetBooks, for example.

The suite has only "hundreds" of customers so far, and it is evolving. Evers also told me NetBooks will soon add more features to help its users run a Web-based retail store, and that there will be a cash register (point of sale) module soon, too. However, he's not going to expand the product to serve non-product-based businesses any time soon.

The product costs $200 a month for eight users (you business' CPA, bookkeeper, and marketing professional; plus five others of your choosing). Additional users can be added for a fee. Telephone support from actual company employees is included; Evers says he doesn't appreciate the "deterrent support model" of requiring users to seek other users for support; or for obnoxious hold music that drives customers away.

NetBooks is not yet the killer Web-based office-data suite that Evers wants it to be, but it's a solid app that solves several small-business problems.

See also: NetSuite.

Customers who want to try running software on Red Hat Enterprise Linux using Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud now can get started.

The leading Linux seller announced Monday that its beta program for the online service is now open to the public. The for-fee program includes email-based support.

Initially, the service will use the latest release of RHEL, version 5.1, but new releases will be issued later, Red Hat said.

The service uses variable pricing, Red Hat said when it announced the service earlier this month. It costs $19 per month plus 21, 53, or 94 cents per hour, depending on computing and storage capacity, plus 11 cents per gigabyte of data transferred in and 19 cents per gigabyte transferred out.

(Via Matt Asay's The Open Road).