Industry competitors are ‘rearranging deck chairs’, says Xero CEO
Xero was “very comfortable” with the announcement of iBizz, a cloud accounting program by software vendor Acclipse, Xero CEO Rod Drury told BoxFreeIT.
“This looks like yet another rearranging of the deck chairs as the accounting software market goes through a very rapid vendor transition,” Drury said.
Acclipse issued a press release last Monday about iBizz, a “full-featured” accounting system that would sell for $5 a month plus data charges for automatic bank feeds provided by financial services aggregator BankLink. Acclipse CEO Mike Chisholm promised the software would launch in two months and would provide accounts payable and receiveable, invoices and quoting but no payroll, inventory and multi-currency ability.
Drury also questioned Acclipse’s claim that the code behind iBizz had been bought from an established cloud accounting vendor.
“We keep a close track on the industry and have no idea where iBizz has come from though it’s pretty obvious from the screen shots that it’s another fairly blantant rip off of the Xero UI (user interface) and screen flows.
“If there was another good code base out there I’m sure either Reckon or MYOB would have grabbed it as they have a lot more funding than Acclipse,” said Drury. Even if iBizz had been written as a direct copy of Xero, it could only copy the external aspects of the software rather than the code itself, Drury added.
“With SaaS, the massive investment we’ve made is locked away on our servers and we know there are no shortcuts to that,” he said.