I was excited to hear about Intuit’s sale of QuickBase to the private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe. With our office just down the street from QuickBase, we have great access to staff there, and I’m confident now that the sale will make the product stronger, and thus be a positive for consultants as well.
Like many consultants who assist clients with Intuit products, I was concerned about the sale of QuickBase. Supporting clients on QuickBase applications is a key part of my company’s work, so the quality and availability of QuickBase is a key factor in our future.
For ProAdvisors, QuickBase has recently become especially important for applications like project management, since Intuit introduced a technology (Sync) for connecting directly with QuickBooks.
In the old days of shrink-wrapped software, you could recommend a product to a client knowing that even if the product died (remember Lotus 123 anyone?), your client could continue using it on their computer until they found the right replacement.
But now that most software lives in the cloud, consultants need to be a lot more careful. Products can be abruptly terminated (like Coghead) or suddenly become un-affordable (like TrackVia). Bottom line – as consultants, we need to watch our recommendations carefully.
So with the sale of QuickBase, there were a couple things I was wanted to know. Would long term staff start bailing out? Would the management team stick around? Most importantly, what would happen with the development roadmap? QuickBase has been working hard to facilitate connections to QuickBooks Online and other cloud applications, and it’s vital that continue if QuickBase is going to keep its position as a flexible and easy-to-use productivity tool.
Given that, I am happy to say that what I see at QuickBase is all good news. The existing management team, and in fact the entire infrastructure that we deal with, is all staying in place. The development team is expanding, and the company is moving forward with development initiatives. Their recent release of CSV Synch, for example, creates a no-code solution for linking with Excel, Google Drive and ERP applications like SAP and Oracle.
The sales team is also expanding, and we have already seen a 50 % increase in incoming leads.
All in all, this is a far cry from our worst fears that the new owner would squeeze out the profits and then leave QuickBase to die. In retrospect, we should have known better, because there was one overriding factor that ensured that Intuit would place QuickBase in loving hands – the biggest user of QuickBase is Intuit itself. Intuit has thousands of QuickBase applications, many playing essential roles in the company’s day-to-day operations. Intuit had to make sure QuickBase would continue, or they would suffer the consequences themselves.
So in this case, maybe we didn’t have to worry after all.
Eric Segal started developing for QuickBase in 1999 and helped clients through the first ownership transition, from Turning Mill Software to Intuit. Data Collaborative has been developing for QuickBase longer than any other QuickBase Solution Provider, and specializes in long term relationships that make our clients successful everyday.