digibyte: Xero UK crosses 100k customer threshold
- Summary:
- Xero UK crossed a psychologically important barrier when it announced 100,000 customers. Everyone else now has to play catchup. It won't be easy.
This is a psychologically important number. It signifies clear blue water between Xero and all of its competitors like Clear Books, FreeAgent, Kashflow (now owned by IRIS), Intuit and a myriad of others. It also puts enormous pressure on Sage to respond without incurring the wrath of its financial masters.
Xero has no such constraints, having consistently signaled a growth strategy that inevitably means being less concerned about the bottom line and focusing instead on customer acquisition.
Earlier in the month, Stephen Kelly, CEO Sage was reported as saying:
I got a text from one lady who said that she’s using Sage Live. She said it was revolutionizing accounting and that when using it it makes the hairs on her arms stand up and goose bumps on the back of her neck. In 32 years in this industry, I’ve never had that.
It's a great marketing soundbite but that's the kind of message the cloud vendors have heard repeatedly over the years. It's a given in some circles. It's allure will wear off very quickly.
As a side note, Xero only counts paying customers. Any freebies are not added into the numbers. On the other hand, it has been difficult to get an accurate figure on SageLive customer numbers, how many are free, how many are paying and whether the company is double counting to include other Sage subscription customers.
Disclosure: diginomica is a Xero customer at time of writing.