EIPP (e-invoicing) and StartUp World

I attended OpenCoffee London this past Thursday specially to meet the team from Sun Microsystems. Here is a snap shot of my interactivity:

Sun Microsystems

Discussed two aspects with Sun team which comprised of my friend, Stewart Townsend from Manchester, and Sanjay Sharma (Director - Startups and Emerging Markets Market Development) from the USA and Sharon Moore (Senior Director - Partner Marketing EMEA) from Paris:

1. Sun and Causeway Technologies - the idea behind this discussion was to understand how Sun Microsystems could help Causeway Technologies (vice versa) drive its revenues and profits within the UK Construction market. Unfortunately, computer hardware has become such a commodity with thin or almost non-existent profit margins, it does not make much commercial sense for software vendors to bundle hardware with their offers. In addition, large buyers already have global hardware procurement strategies in place, which means this is a no go area. But from time to time, opportunities could arise which makes commercial sense, therefore I have no intention of terminating my discussions with Sun Microsystems. Sun and I go a long way, since specifying and recommending Sun hardware for SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems in early to mid 90’s. ebdex is still a Sun ISV partner.
2. Launch of StartUp Essentials programme in the UK - I am a very keen supporter of this programme, especially with respect to edocr and North West based startups. I had the opportunity to explain the value proposition behind edocr to Sharon in detail. edocr is exactly what Sun is looking to support through the Startup Essentials programme.

I also introduced Sanjay and Sharon to:

1. Sam Sethi - about the concept behind blognation. I see Sun as a key advertiser/sponsor of blognation, if they are serious about European startups. In return, Sun will get to know much about the European startup scene from one site instead of having to search the Internet, reducing significant resources from Sun’s end.
2. Saul Klein - the man behind OpenCoffee events. Would you believe, it was the first time I actually met Saul even though we communicated over e-mails and Skype in the past.

Bit about Blognation - the empire Sam is building:

1. Blognation is expected to be launched next week.
2. Blognation crew had their first get together to discuss the launch this week.
3. Blognation will be first launched in the UK (now that makes sense - as I said from Day One)
4. Blognation will then be launched in about 16 countries
5. Initially it will cover “technology” and “mobile” but will be extended to include “enterprise”.

Some of the old faces (not necessarily aged!) I met included:

1. David Terrar - MD of D Squared C and Twinfield UK. I spoke to David about my third startup idea, and the possibility of reviving ebdex as a reseller of number of complementary solutions. In this respect, I am becoming bit like David as he offers a portfolio of products from web design to accountancy solutions. David has also joined blognation crew.
2. Phil Hemsted - co-founder of Yuuuguu from the North West - Yuuguu presented at Web Essentials held yesterday in London
3. David Ingram - Director of Izimi who spoke at the last NW StartUp 2.0 event in Manchester.
4. Lee McFadden - Firefli Systems

The new faces I met included:

1. Jof Arnold of Brainbakery.com - His company offers social networks that can be white labelled. This is particularly of interest to edocr as well as the third company idea I am working on.
2. Mitchell Sava - Founder of Virtuoscircle and Polywonk - his company is developing a social network around policies. Interesting point is that his wife is a procurement specialist - a potential reader for my blog.
3. Nicole Simon - possibly an A-list blogger (not sure what the criteria for this loose classification is) from Germany. I have seen Nicole’s profile on-line before but it was nice to meet her. She is also part of the blognation crew.
4. Anish Lakhani from PratiSoft bringing on line poker to UK.
5. Tony Lucas - CEO of XCalibre Communications - I had a good chat with Tony regarding hosting for edocr. He seems to have a startup offering that is much affordable than traditional hosting solutions in the UK.
6. Karin Hoegh of Podhandle - Specialist in podcasting
7. Janet Parkinson of Talking Voices - London based with representative in Manchester.
8. Vincent Camara from intruders.tv - I am looking forward to Vincent getting involved with NW StartUp 2.0 events, covering the entrepreneurs of the North.

Apologies if I forgot to mention anyone else’s names.

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In my opinion, Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment (EIPP) is not an easily understood subject by Venture Capitalists (VCs) even though Burns e-Commerce, OB10 and Accountis had significant funding from the VC community.

In the case of OB10, this is believed to be in the range of US$30m. But according to Jamie Gunn, CEO of OB10 “we never had the level of investment widely reported”. May be this is due to not meeting the financial targets set by the investors. To my knowledge, OB10 is not yet profitable but has achieved significant year-on-year sales growth over the last 3 years.

Burns e-Commerce is also understood to had funding of about UK£18m. Most of this is believed to have spent on technology platform development.

Funding into Accountis up to end of 2006 was believed to be just around UK£1m, therefore Accountis perhaps is the best among the three companies above in terms of cash utilisation. Accountis was funded by Finance Wales to the tune of £0.5m in its early days. Mike Bakewell, the Investment Executive who dealt with Accountis at the time now works for Merseyside Special Investment Fund (MSIF), which is based in the North West of England. This makes Mike perhaps the only VC in the North West right now who has invested in to the EIPP space.

Jamie, Rhys and Neil, happy to correct if above figures are incorrect.

Ed, thanks for the tip.

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Mercator Advisory Group has released a 28 page report with a whopping price tag of $2,450 on purchasing cards, integrated procurement solutions, the commercial card market capturing supporting solutions such as Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment (EIPP). According to the press release, the highlights of this report include:

• The field for purchasing card issuing has changed in the last decade to better accommodate end-user enterprises’ technological and operational needs.
• Recent acquisitions and investments by major issuers have brought enhanced solutions technology in-house as an added value to current and prospective customers.
• The impending launch of the federal General Services Administration’s SmartPay®2 charge card program will contribute to further product innovation.
• The threshold between small businesses and corporations is losing definition as p-cards penetrate down-market.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there is a way to access such reports at a lower cost? What would you consider as a fair price?

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Today, we discussed the product road map for Causeway’s Tradex. I wish I can talk about it. The plans and the additional functionality that will be available within the next 6 to 12 months will change the Status Quo. In addition, we also had some great sales wins this month that is worth talking about. Well done Duncan! I am glad to be part of the team, even though my involvement will come to an end shortly. The learning has been immense. Thank you Phil for the opportunity!

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BASDA is the Business Application Software Developers Association based in the UK, which represents almost 200 of the world’s leading business software vendors including Causeway Technologies. BASDA works with governments and policy-making groups in the UK, Europe and worldwide. In early 2000’s BASDA came up with ebis-XML standard for exchange of structured documents between organisations. ebdex standardised ebis-XML as its internal standard. These days, number of accounting software vendors has ability to exchange documents with other applications using ebis-XML, e.g. Sage Transaction E-mail. BASDA events are great opportunities to build relationships. Good example been meeting Phil Brown (CEO of Causeway Technologies) at my first BASDA CEO summit. This is when Phil offered me the opportunity to resell Tradex as a white labelled hub instead of developing ebdex Document Exchange from scratch. With hindsight, I know what I would do now if the same offer was made.

Here are couple of dates for your diary:

1. 02/07/2007: General Council Meeting - 12.00 start - working lunch - Restricted to General Council Members Only
2. 02/07/2007: Marketing Forum - 3pm - 5.30 pm (2.30pm registration & coffee). Free to BASDA Members Hear the latest news, ideas and case studies from guest speakers on: - PR Sara Render from Kinross and Render on the latest in IT focused PR - website analytics - PPC The i-team update us on latest developments - responsible marketing Tim Purcell from CO3 (corporate responsibility experts) explains - the trends in software marketing Simon Rudge (high tech copywriter) shares his software marketing survey results
3. 02/07/2007: BASDA Networking - 6pm - 9.30pm - £45 for BASDA Members - includes dinner and drinks ? Drinks and networking - Journalist panel ? including John Stokdyk, IT Editor of AccountingWEB and Bryan Glick, Editor of Computing magazine - 3 course Dinner - BASDA update from Kevin Hart, Chairman
4. 03/07/2007 - BASDA Symposium - 10am - 4.30pm - £195 BASDA Members, £350 non BASDA members At the Symposium: - The Official Launch of the BASDA Special Interest Groups ? HR & Payroll ? TASSA (Tax and Final Accounts) ? Financials ? eBusiness ? Construction ? Carter - Keynote speaker from HMRC - Software as a Service - guest speakers share the varied dimensions of delivery - Expanding into Europe - different successful approaches from BASDA members

I plan to attend events 2 and 3 above.

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It amazes me to know that there is real talent in the North West (NW) of England with respect to e-invoicing providers. These include:

1. Burns e-Commerce - hub based EIPP player - targeting multinationals
2. Version One - accounts payable automation combining scanning/OCR
3. Digital Vision - accounts payable automation combining scanning/OCR from Kofax
4. Kewill - EDI based solutions
5. Freeway Commerce - EDI based solutions

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4th event of OpenCoffee Manchester was held today at the usual venue. Number of attendees were disappointing to say the least, a drop from 15 to 8, but we attracted two new comers Nick Burton and Siobhan Clarke, and had more time to network with smaller number of attendees. Many areas were flooded in surrounding areas such as Sheffield, which may have resulted in the absence of Dean Sadler (plus.net CTO) and Lee Strafford (plus.net ex-CEO). I hope everyone is OK.

Here are the attendees and some of the discussions that took place:

1. Ed French of Rising Stars- I had an opportunity to brief Ed the intentions behind edocr.
2. Paul Robinson of Vagueware - Progress of Manchester co-working initiative has been low due to Paul having to manage high number of projects simultaneously.  We also discussed about the lack of progress on Barcamp Manchester, which is organised by the guys from Geekup.
3. Paul Rouke of prwd - Looks like Paul has attracted a new client with a niche solution.  
4. Stephen Henesy -  Creativityetc 
5. Stewart Townsend of Sun Microsystems - We spoke extensively about the StartUp Essentials programme, and Sun’s connectivity to SAP. Since SAP Sapphire Vienna, I continue to build my relationship with SAP.
6. Siobhan Clarke of MBA programme at Manchester Business School - Siobhan is an ex-employee of Burns e-Commerce. We spoke about the EIPP industry and one of the projects she is currently involved in - studying revenue models of social networking based businesses.
7. Nick Burton of OpenSkies - A brand consultant

References:

• OpenCoffee Manchester is moving in the right direction
• OpenCoffee Manchester - 2nd Event
• First OpenCoffee Manchester

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I recently installed Vision from Sun Systems to interrogate a database, which I believe resulted in corrupting Qumana database. All my attempts to speak to Qumana has resolved to nothing. After weeks of low blogging activity, I finally decided it is time to move on. I lost access to several half written stories, one particular long story about JP Morgan Chase’s acquisition of Xign.

In a crisis like this (if you call this a crisis in the first place), wouldn’t it be nice to call a friend who has significant knowledge about blogging and associated tools than spend hours searching for a good free blog writer? I hear you say, yes! Guess what? I know such an individual by the name of David Terrar.

Rest is history as they say. Here I am using Windows Live Writer within minutes of talking to David. Thanks buddy

Update 1

The whole process took 16 minutes, i.e. from finishing my chat with David, down loading and installing the software, configuring with my wordpress blog to proof-reading this post on my blog.

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These days most of us use Google for search. These are the results one gets when entering “eipp” as search criteria (time sensitive results, as you very well know):

1. ebilling.org- ah, the NACHA’s Council for Electronic Billing and Payment site. Good starting point for anyone interested in EIPP.
2. Forrester - this is Penny Gillespie’s 14 page report published in 2004. Still relevant. Still selling at US$399.00. I call this daylight robbery. Forrester is a genius at making money. This comes down to brand. Would anyone be interested in purchasing similar quality reports for fraction of the money Forrester is charging?
3. Forrester- Andrew Bartels report on Accounts Payable, EIPP, Q3 2005 - Guess what? Its also priced at US$399.00. Again, a relevant report. Not sure why Basware was chosen as the highest-scoring vendor in Europe.
4. Eastern Interconnect Phasor Project - nothing to do with EIPP as we know
5. Accountis - well done to get this position. Is this simply because of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)? Or is there more to it than meets the eye?
6. manojranaweera.com- ah, we know about this one, don’t we? Not sure why my chat with Andrew was picked up!
7. webopia - poorly written definition for EIPP. My attempts at coming up with a better explanation on Wikipedia was removed by Wikipedians, as they considered it an unknown subject.
8. webopia - well done to get two places. No better than the previous definition.
9. ZDnet - Written in 2001
10. Spendmatters- ah, Jason Busch’s blog. Nice to see another blog making the top 10.

I ran the same search on another computer at the same time. It produced the same results except for the 10th entry. Both used IE7. Mozilla Firefox produces the same results as above.What happens if we restrict this list to pages from UK?

1. Accountis - well done again
2. Accountis Blog - well done
3. manojranaweera.com - glad to be no. 3 - but for how long?
4. EIPP Conference taking place in September 07 - This is clearly an European event, and not a UK event. Perhaps the site is hosted in UK server.
5. Chief Executive Officer - ah! a paper from Mike Arenth of Ariba advising on accounts payable benefits.
6. ebdex - what can I say?
7. ebdex- I am embarrased!
8. Clerical Med - nothing to do with EIPP as we know
9. ZDNet - white paper on O2C - second article on EIPP. Its not a subject covered by ZDNet
10. TbiConnect - well done Simon - 2nd (ignoring ebdex) vendor on Top 10

So where is OB10, Xign, Bottomline Technologies, Esker, Ariba, Burns e-Commerce, Causeway Technologies, etc? Are they not concerned with web rankings anymore? Is it because most of them only offers EIP (not payment) solutions? Nope! for example, analyse the source code of OB10’s home page and you will find EIPP. Then what? Perhaps, smaller companies are paying much more attention to web rankings than the incumbents. Perhaps there is also the belief that you will not get leads through websites. I disagree. Even in its sorry state, ebdex continues to receive enquiries, from UK as well as from Europe. Is that sufficient to warrant SEO costs? You betcha, it is.

Update 1

Most of these companies seem to optimise their websites on “e-invoicing” rather than on “EIPP”.

Tags: Google rankings, eipp, e-invoicing, accountis, TbiConnect, Spendmatters, Chief Executive Officer, ZDNet, ebdex, webopia, Forrester, Mike Arenth, Ariba

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The idea behind Sun Microsystems’ StartUp Essentials program is to help startups get companies off the ground without breaking the bank. The programme started on 2 Nov 06 on an exprimental basis, and currently limited to US companies only. According to Sanjay Sharma, Director of Sun Startup Essentials programme:

“A lot of these companies have expertise in their specific area where they are building an application, but they may have all kinds of technical questions. They could be about specific products or technologies, something as simple as ‘Which server should I buy?’ or as complicated as ‘How do I architect my solution today so that tomorrow my architecture and infrastructure will scale to the growth of my company’“

In a nutshell, Sun does not want to miss out on the current wave of startups entering into the market place.  Infact, you could almost argue, Sun is looking for the next Google, the next YouTube and so on. This is what Juan Carlos Soto, Sun’s Vice President of Market Development had to say:

“Sun is better positioned than any other big company to tap into a new wave of Internet entrepreneurship. All of this software is available free for both development and deployment, and that together with our best-in-class hardware that we have for these kinds of applications makes Sun a natural partner for startup”

I have been working with the Sun Team for a while and is very keen on getting the programme launched in the UK. You might be interested to know that Sanjay Sharma and Stewart Townsend will be at OpenCoffee London on 28th July to assess the demand for the programme in the UK. The date is firmly on my diary. Make sure it is in yours as well.

Tags: Startup Essentials, Sun Microsystems, Stewart Townsend,Juan Carlos Soto, Juan Carlos Soto, Open Coffee, Open Coffee London

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Just to let you know, that Causeway Technologies will be visiting London, Birmingham and Manchester in October ‘07. If you operate within the UK construction sector, this is one of the best opportunities to meet a leading software house with deep knowledge of the UK construction industry. Causeway Technologies’ key products and solutions include: project accounting, estimating, enterprise content management, and document exchanges (Tradex platform that I am involved with). Who knows, you might even see me at the Manchester event - bit too early to confirm! If you are interested in attending, either contact me or Causeway Technologies marketing manager here.

• 09 Oct  2007 - Wembley Stadium, London
• 10 Oct  2007 - Villa Park Stadium, Birmingham
• 11 Oct  2007 - Old Trafford Football Stadium, Manchester

References:

• Creating a web 2.0 buzz inside Causeway Technologies
• Manoj and Causeway Technologies

Tags: Causeway Technologies, Tradex, Causeway’s Tradex, ECM, Enterprise Content Management

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Looks like businesses are beginning to use slideshare.net. This slide pack is from Anscers, a business credit products and services company.

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According to corporate website, Burns e-Commerce has acquired Investmaster Group Ltd from Canadian investment management company AGF Management Ltd for an undisclosed sum.  According to Peter Little, CEO of Burns:

“The synergy between the two companies is technology based. Both organisations support and assist companies operating in environments that are manually intensive, paper-based and heavily regulated. We see great opportunity to combine the expertise and technology in these areas to bring new innovation to the wealth management market.”

I don’t get it! Wealth management, and document exchanges - I cannot see a synergy other than the transactions! First thing to do is understand the capability of Investmaster Group.

Investmaster Group Limited has been providing IT solutions to the wealth management and institutional broking sectors for over 20 years. Investmaster has a well established client base and its technology handles over 25 percent of the London Stock Exchange’s daily private client volumes. The Group employs 62 plus IT professionals in the development of truly integrated front, middle and back office systems and is committed to the provision of genuine straight-through processing solutions. Investmaster’s InVantage product suite covers client management, reporting and the full trade lifecycle from front office decision support through to settlement, ensuring pre- and post-trade compliance and underpinning the clients’ business in an increasingly regulated market.

Looks like Burns is adding B2C capability to existing B2B environment - tricky! Perhaps a telephone call is needed to Neil Baker to better understand the expected synergies.

References:

• Burns e-Commerce, Accountis, OB10 and Causeway get new facelifts in 2006 
• Introducing Burns e-Commerce  

Tags: burns, burns e-commerce

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Albany Software has been operating since 1989, and in 2005, the company reported revenues of £7.593 million and headcount of 93 people. Albany has gone through three name changes in the past, these being: Goodwing Computers -> Halon Computers (1989) -> Albany Computers (1989) -> Albany Software (1994). The company is 100% owned by Adrian Stafford-Jones (based on 2004 accounts), who became a Director of the company in 1991. Unfortunately, Companies House is now closed (i.e. past midnight), so I cannot purchase the last set of accounts, and these figures may require an update.

Albany Software’s product portfolio can be easily split into:

Payment Solutions:

• ALBACSip – automating the payment and collection of funds
• ALBACScs – multi-user BACS solution
• ALBACSenterprise – customisable payments solution
• ALBANYverify - validation of bank account and credit card details
• ALBANYverify API - point of entry validation of bank account and credit card details
• eBANK - automatic preparation and validation of cross- border funds transfers
• eCOLLECT - collections management for Direct Debits and credit cards

Document Exchange

• eCONNECT - e-document distribution solution

The products are sold through a strong channel that includes Coins, Touchstone, RedSkyIT, Asyst and others. Watchout for Albany #2 for a brief review of eConnect

Tags:  Albany Software,

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I love slideshare.net. If you are a lousy powerpoint presenter as I am, slideshare.net should be the first place you should go to get some excellent self-learning. Dennis, thanks for the tip.

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