By Larry Lange

What would you do if your company’s underlying business model was changing so quickly that more than half its sales were coming from a new way of delivering your product? That’s the challenge facing Intuit Inc.

Intuit, a provider of computer software for small-business accounting, tax preparation and personal finance, offers such well-known brands as Quicken, QuickBooks and TurboTax. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company, founded in 1983, today has annual revenue of $3.1 billion, some 8,000 employees, and more than 10 million customers in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

While Intuit has grown largely by selling packaged software, the company has also been developing both its online-only, software as a service (SaaS) product offerings and its connected services, an integrated package of software and services in one offering. It is critical that it do so because new competitors are offering their products in SaaS-only versions. Even at Intuit, SaaS products now account for more than 50 percent of the company’s sales.

Opportunity Shift
Intuit’s CIO, Ginny Lee, is playing a large role in this opportunity shift. Lee was appointed CIO last year, building on her background as Intuit’s VP of Business Operations and VP of Small Business Payroll, its largest services business unit. (Lee joined Intuit in 1996.) Now she leads the company’s 650-person IT organization and is helping to take Intuit’s SaaS model to the next level. It’s all part of a Lean IT effort to deliver maximum customer value and eliminate waste. “The Lean concept is a big part of Intuit’s DNA, and it’s no different for IT,” Lee says. “We enable the business units to accelerate their growth, and we enable functional groups to maximize employee productivity via great processes and technology solutions.”

Intuit’s ongoing move to SaaS makes sense in today’s challenging economy, say industry experts. Industrywide  SaaS sales are expected to reach $8 billion this year, up by more than 20 percent, according to Gartner, and they will grow by nearly the same annual rate through 2013. As Robert Mahowald, Director of SaaS Research at market watchers IDC, wrote in a recent report, “SaaS services ... allow for relatively easy expansions during hard times.”