Xero announced last week it was upgrading the computing systems which run its online accounting software to scale with its ambition of servicing 1 million customers.
The system had received incremental upgrades since it was first launched in 2009 with 15,000 customers. The transition to a more powerful platform would increase the program’s ability to deal better with errors that could cause downtime, said Chris Ridd, Xero’s Australian managing director. In computing terms this was referred to as upgrading the system’s availability and resiliency.
Ridd compared the system upgrade to cloud CRM pioneer Salesforce.com which moved to an expensive, more dependable computing architecture in its seventh year of operation.
“We are seeing the same sorts of dynamics in our business as well,” Ridd said. “We are planning our business model around getting to one million customers. That’s a big bold goal, everything has to fall in place behind that. It impacts not just your (computing) infrastructure, it impacts your systems, CRM, ticketing and customer care and a whole range of things.”
Ridd declined to disclose details of the new computing system because it was commercially sensitive.
Ridd denied there were any issues with performance with Xero’s current infrastructure. “I very rarely get any feedback about performance. Typically when we get feedback it is about individual cases and generally it’s not linked to our systems,” Ridd said. “We don’t get partners calling us and have (support) tickets regarding system performance.”
Complaints in Xero’s community forum were more likely due to problems on the user’s side such as browser issues and slow internet connections. “When we release new features and they impact reporting, rogue queries can impact performance and it’s something we monitor,” Ridd said. “There are system-wide issues that have happened but generally they are resolved in a few minutes.”
Xero’s accounting software would be offline from Sunday 27 January from 6am to 2pm in Sydney and Melbourne, 5am to 1pm in Brisbane, 530am to 130pm in Adelaide, 3am to 11am in Perth, and 8am to 4pm in New Zealand.
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