Vindicia Selected by Intuit for Online Billing Management

Announced today, the Partner Platform enables third-party developers to build great products and successful software as a service (SaaS) businesses by providing everything developers need to create innovative, rich Internet applications, and market and sell their applications to millions of small business customers.

Intuit's Partner Platform is an integral component of the company's Connected Services strategy. Unveiled in June, this strategy includes new online services that connect to the data inside Intuit's popular QuickBooks® products, new software delivered as a service and tools that connect users to each other within the Intuit small business network.

"Vindicia provides us with a flexible, highly scalable and customizable billing infrastructure that will enable us to help developers build successful businesses," said Bill Lucchini, vice president and general manager of Intuit's platform as a service group. "With customer billing taken care of, developers are now free to focus on solving big unmet needs for their customers by creating amazing applications."

Intuit's strategic announcement underscores the role Vindicia plays in the industry trend toward "platform as a service." Software companies are increasingly encouraging developers to build applications on their platforms and to distribute those applications online as a turnkey solution. In addition to the distribution and ecosystem benefits for developers, this "platform as a service" model offers vendors an opportunity to expand their reach with developers. But this also adds another layer of complexity to the underlying billing infrastructure requirements, requirements that can only be met by a billing solution flexible enough to handle this model's specific needs.

"Intuit's connected services strategy is exactly the kind of offering we had in mind when we founded Vindicia," said Gene Hoffman, chairman and CEO of Vindicia. "As innovators like Intuit take advantage of platform as a service capabilities to provide their customers with additional value, there is an urgent need for a scalable billing solution to underpin these services. Vindicia understands the unique requirements such strategies entail."

Vindicia CashBox will provide Intuit with an online billing infrastructure that enables the company to engage the wide range of developers expected to join the Intuit Partner Platform. Specifically, Vindicia CashBox will give Intuit the ability to implement multiple subscription pricing models for developer applications, including the ability to instantaneously determine the correct U.S. sales tax to charge based on tax jurisdiction and the nature of the application. CashBox also provides various communication templates to drive end-user renewals and retention. Finally, CashBox contains reporting functionality that will provide Intuit with the ability to track revenue by individual developer -- a critical piece of information in executing a successful developer program.