Oracle Corp CEO Larry Ellison has personally backed a new applications outsourcing company concentrating on the accounting for small businesses sector. Privately-held NetLedger Inc, based in Menlo Park, California, says it is majority-owned by Ellison, but won’t say how much money he has provided. The company, founded by ex Oracle staffer Evan Goldberg, has ten staff and has been operating for about a year.
Goldberg, former vice president of development in Oracle’s New Media Division, originally left the company to found multimedia tools firm mBED Software Inc back in 1995. But Goldberg later approached Ellison with a far bigger opportunity. Accounting systems are the most horizontal applications there are, according to the company, and therefore ideal for outsourcing. NetLedger is focusing on the one to 50 user small business sector, and taking advantage of its Oracle connections to use Oracle Business Online and the Oracle 8 database for its foundation technology. It has built its applications from scratch, and offers all the basic accounting modules, except for payroll.
NetLedger says it will compete directly with Peachtree Software Inc and Intuit Inc’s Quickbooks, but says it has two major advantages. First, it can offer the power of a full-blown Oracle database to small users that would otherwise not be able to afford or administer it, meaning that small firms will have access to more sophisticated auditing and multi-users/multi-level permission capabilities that have not been possible to date. Having a powerful database in place will be even more important once bill and invoices start to be sent via the network over the next six months or so, says the company. Second, NetLedger will offer the service at $4.94 per month, with ten passwords and capacity for 1,000 transactions per month, or $60 per year with automatic upgrades, compared with around $180 for QuickBooks, not including upgrades. Users need only have a web browser on their system, although there is an option to store data locally if they wish.
The company says it plans to move beyond accounting into e- stores, e-commerce and customer relationship management in the future. Meanwhile, it already has its first group of charter customers up and running. NetLedger says it expects eventually to broaden out its base of investors, and says it expects to be the leader in terms of number of users in the small business accounting sector over the next year or so.
