Overview

Key Product

BastionLedger, our hosted, branded  financial accounting services portal designed as both a direct sales offering, and to give CPA firms a web platform for their clients.

Business Purpose

The purpose of Expansism is to gather and reward a focused team of industry professions to design, deliver, and grow the business of our Web2.0/B2B accounting portal for small business, and to offer this online platform to the professional services sector.

Business History

This business came into existence on 20 June 2006. Our parent has been trading for over six years.

Industry

This product is aimed at the accountancy and professional services industry.  Expansism is our retail product, but the main offering is a hosted platform offering this system as the firm's own brand.  In the future we would like to package third-party business services suppliers products to deliver value and choice to our Members. 

Suppliers

We own the entire software stack from the operating system up.  We intend to host customer systems through a data centre operation, and the system is available to be hosted on customer site using their own hardware.

Customers

The retail platform is aimed at micro and SME businesses.  We will shortly be adding a simple migration feature for MYOB and Quicken customers so that we also appeal to established businesses.

The wholesale platform is aimed at Certified Practicing Accountant (CPA) firms who perform compliance work with these micro and SME clients.

As we add analytical and management accounting features to the platform, we will also be targetting medium business directly.

Promotion

At this stage, we're looking to directly promote the retail operation within the IT consulting sector.  The wholesale product will be promoted through subscriptions in industry publications and through exhibition space at the peak body annual conventions.

Market Research and Market Potential

According to Springboard Research, Australia is the largest and most mature SaaS market in the Asia-Pacific region. Springboard estimates that Asia-Pacific SaaS revenues will grow from US$274 million in 2007 to around US$1.8 billion by 2011. The industry analyst firm Gartner estimates the Asia-Pacific SaaS market is growing twice as fast as the market for traditional on-premise applications.

Competitors

The desktop marketplace is saturated, but as businesses look to online solutions, there is very little choice at present.  In NZ, Xero are the early mover in this space.  In Australia the industry is much less developed and we would suggest Saasu is the most prominent competitor.

Nobody is offering a branded platform to the financial services sector.

SWOT Analysis

Strengths

ISP-grade datacentre infrastructure
Open systems
Collaboration focus

Weaknesses

Ecosystem interoperability - Australia is quite unsophisticated
To the extent small business actually cares about platform, Linux isn't as well understood as Microsoft.

Opportunities

Internet is the platform of the future
Stakeholder collaboration

Threats

We're not the first to market
CPA's hate technology and adoption will be slow

Distribution Channels

Distribution will be via our internet portals.  Our present retail brand is http://www.expansism.com, and provisioning, deployment and management of customer systems is handled with our https://linux.last-bastion.net infrastructure.

Business Systems

We use the exact same back office suite we sell to others - integrated within our online portal.  Our client service helpdesk is incorporated into our billing systems.  The helpdesk also incorporates our sales force platform.  All of our sales literature, user manuals, API documentation is produced and published online.  Collections are managed via our internet merchant facilities.