Harrison Polites for BusinessSpectator writes: The race to lead Australia's small business sector onto the cloud is about to heat up, with an American juggernaut priming for a push to dominate the country's cloud-based account software market.
Intuit's Quickbook launched in Australia last year, and has spent the past 12 months observing Australian businesses and tweaking its software for the market.
Now, a week out from the launch of its new HTML 5, web-app based accounting product QuickBooks Online, it's newly-appointed vice president and managing director of Intuit Asia Pacific, Brad Paterson told Technology Spectator that he's looking to knock out rivals and establish dominance in the market.
"We're number one in the US, I fully expect that we will be number one in Australia overtime," Mr Patterson said.
He added that aims to double the size of its local team by the end of the year, launch new marketing initiatives and "accelerate exponentially" from here on out.
Quickbooks faces some tough competition in the Australian market.
The incumbent, MYOB, has a strong lead in Australia reportedly serving up to 1.2 million businesses between Australian and New Zealand.
And another rival New Zealand based cloud accounting company, Xero, recently reported signs that its making a significant dent on that lead, saying that gained 24,000 of a total 70,000 Australian users in the past five months.
Globally, Mr Patterson said that Quickbooks has around 1.3 million customers - the majority of which are in the US. He declined to go into detail about the firm's Australian user base, saying the company does not breakdown its users by region.
Mr Patterson also confirmed that Quickbooks is not looking to steal customers off its rivals, but is instead intending to go after small businesses that still use "shoeboxes of receipts" and "XL spreadsheets" to manage their finances.
The company's own research tells them that despite MYOB and Xero's efforts, around 50 per cent of Australian small businesses still manage their enterprise in this manner.
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