Published on the 18/12/2014 | Written by Beverley Head
A Sydney-based business is taking on ERP and financial software vendors with a tightly integrated bolt-on for Office 365 that is being hosted in Microsoft’s Australian data centres…
Hands On Systems has launched a spin off business to sell Financials for Office 365 (FO365) initially in Australia, then New Zealand and across Asia Pacific.
John Munnelly, the CEO of Financials for Office 365 in Australia, said that Australia was leading the world in terms of ERP cloud adoption, and that the launch of the FO365 basically pushed down the capability of the Microsoft Dynamics suite into the small and medium business space.
The company has around 50 clients at present, although only one company – the Starlight Children’s Foundation not-for-profit – is using the software hosted in Microsoft’s recently opened Australian Azure data centres. Munnelly said that the launch by March of a locally hosted version of Office 365 would see the company transition its other FO365 users out of the Singapore data centre and onto the local cloud.
Munnelly said that the company has been appointed by Microsoft as the exclusive local distributor of FO365 for at least the next five years, and that the organisation was now building up a raft of resellers.
“Microsoft has tried this before with Small Business Accounting which they launched with great fanfare in the US. It lasted all of 18 months before they withdrew it from the market,” he said.
However the appetite for cloud-based financial systems and ERP has matured in the intervening years – witness the rise of Xero, MYOB, NetSuite and the like. Munnelly said that FO365 would compete on a number of fronts including its scalability (he said it was being run in some private clouds for up to 250 users), tight integration with Office 365, its ability to handle relatively complex distribution and manufacturing requirements, and the access to a locally hosted service.
Entry level pricing starts at $29 per user per month and options up to the Premium edition which costs $159 per user per month.
In terms of the integration with Office 365 Munnelly said it was possible to link Skype for Business with a purchase order created in FO365 and click to call from within an invoice; that SharePoint could be used to handle all document management for a business; and that reporting and documents could be tightly integrated with Excel and Word.
