The 2009 Software Satisfation Awards confirmed that software as a service has taken hold of the small business market with victories for Cloud developers in all of the key SME categories.
More than 400 software users and developers gathered at the Royal Courts of Justice in London on Thursday 8 October to celebrate the awards, which are based on user votes from BusinessZone.co.uk and other online communities in the Sift Media portfolio.
“In spite of tough market conditions, more people participated in our online survey this year, and overall the industry improved its average satisfaction rating,” said Sift managing director Ben Heald as he welcomed diners. “The cynics might say this reflects the fact that the new range of web-based services are forcing everyone to raise their game; and the game of ‘lock-in on premise’ is over.”
KashFlow, founded by energetic UK Business Forums member Duane Jackson, won an impressive double, picking up both the web-based accounting and small business awards. Even more impressively, KashFlow and its fellow Cloud providers Arithmo and Liquid took three out of the four places on the SME accounting shortlist - edging out better known names such as Sage and QuickBooks.
Octopus HR repeated last year’s success in the small business HR category, and also picked up a prize for web-hosted HR, just ahead of Enterprise HR software winner Cascade.
The Cloud computing model is more common for CRM applications. Reversing last year’s roll of honour, the $1bn-turnover Cloud market leader Salesforce.com beat Really Simple Systems to the CRM prize.
In the payroll category, which boasted the highest ratings of any category, Pegasus Opera II Payroll & HR beat last year’s winner MoneySoft Payroll; 12Pay was also nominated and there were honourable mentions for Keytime Payroll and Access Payroll.
The full results are available on the Software Satisfaction Awards website. You can also replay BusinessZone.co.uk's live blog of the event on the right hand side of this page to see how the awards ceremony unfolded.
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