 Live from San Jose, California in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering QuickBooks Connect 2016, sponsored by Intuit QuickBooks. Now, here are your hosts, Jeff Frick and John Walls. Well, welcome back to San Jose here at the Commission Center as here on theCUBE, the SiliconANGLE TV flagship broadcast outlet. We bring you continuing coverage of QuickBooks Connect 2016. I'm John Walls, along with Jeff Frick and we're joined now by Vinay Pai, who heads up the developers group at Intuit and Vinay. Thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time here. Good to see you. Yeah, great to be here. Hope you guys are having a great QuickBooks Connect. We are actually, as a matter of fact, and I was going to ask you the same thing. How was it? I mean, you had a big day yesterday. You met with some 400 developers. Great energy here today. We've got 5,000 attendees. So what's your take on what you're seeing and what you're feeling? I mean, great question. We're seeing a lot of innovation from our developers. The buzz is great around here. So every year, QuickBooks Connect has grown in terms of attendees, but also in terms of what our developers are bringing to customers. So today, we have 1,200 apps that integrate with QuickBooks. 400 of those are in the App Store. And in fact, just from this conference alone, we've actually crossed over to like 433 apps. So we're seeing great growth in innovation and also developers bringing products to market. Well, let's talk a little bit about your group and how it collaborates or integrates with the small business group. So what's that relationship all about and how are you complimenting what they're doing? Yes, great question. So I've been at Intuit seven years, part of that time on the engineering side, helping to build QuickBooks and our platform. But now I lead our developer business. So what we're doing is creating an ecosystem around QuickBooks. You know, there are things that we're going to deliver like accounting, payroll, payments. These are broad horizontal capabilities. Now, we would love to do everything, but the reality is we don't have the people or the expertise and that's where developers come in. We see a lot of innovation happening everywhere, both on small startups as well as we announced some great partnerships like Google. So we're seeing ways to, you know, bring this innovation to our customers and deliver it through the QuickBooks ecosystem. So where's some of the sweet spots for the third party developers, is it? Or geographic localization? Is it really esoteric verticals, really esoteric functionality? Where do you see some of the more interesting things maybe we wouldn't think about from the ecosystem? Yeah, so we live in a global society today. In fact, QuickBooks itself is a global offering. It's in a hundred countries that supports 12 languages and 40 currencies. Now, we don't have all our same capabilities outside of the US. In the US, we have accounting, payroll, payments, but we don't have payroll and payments in other countries. For example, in Australia, we partner with KeyPay. They're very small SaaS startup. They deliver our payroll solution. We have a big partnership with PayPal to do invoice-based payments in Australia and we'll announce a strategic partnership with them where they're going to deliver in UK, also in France. Now, there are some broad geographic capabilities but there are also some verticals. So when you think of e-commerce, retail, manufacturing, these are capabilities we're not going to build but you have Shopify, you have big commerce, you've got companies like Square with Point of Sale that we're already partnering with. So the other thing, we go to a lot of tech conferences and everyone wants a developer, right? It's the age of the developer. Everybody's competing for the developer. Why should a developer invest their time, resources, with your platform versus everybody else who's trying to get their attention? It is a great time to be an engineer and it's a great time to be a developer and I say that somewhat selfishly because I'm an engineer. No, so there's a lot competing for your attention but what we have today is really the platform of choice and the biggest platform for our small businesses and for our developers. We've had a million and a half small businesses that are growing 40% a year. We've also had 150,000 accountants working with these small businesses. So when you're a developer building an accounting app or payroll payment, something in finance, time tracking, bill payment, this is the best platform to publish your app and get the most customers. And we have our app developers published in various different app stores. We're happy for them to be on iPhone or Android but we actually feel like this is the best way they can grow their business. Yeah, we hear so much these days about the cloud, right? And people migrating their services over to the cloud. In terms of small business, now what are you seeing in that kind of adoption or that kind of migration, if you will, and then how are you trying to facilitate that or what can you do to enable that if you find it to be a good solid move for these small businesses to consider? Now, over the last seven years, I've seen a massive shift in demographics. Seven years ago, people didn't trust the cloud and mostly use the desktop. But even in the last year, we've seen this massive adoption of the cloud. We did a survey just a few months ago. We found that nearly two thirds of small businesses already use the cloud today and they're also using third-party apps. And these aren't apps like email, you know, Word, browsers, these are hardcore apps in time tracking and bill payment and retail. And so what we've seen are small businesses themselves are really consumer internet users. They're using Twitter, they're using Facebook. They're already connecting to their bank and the cloud. So this is the natural way for them to run their business. It's a great time to be a SaaS developer who's got an app that can integrate with our platform. Yeah, it's just amazing how with SaaS and more and more the applications really being delivered via SaaS. Now, for that individual person, that small business person who's running their own shop, they can get all the power of the thousands of engineers working into it. The many more thousands of engineers working in the third-party developed ecosystem delivered to their mobile device, their desktop, wherever they are in the world. Totally different ballgame then. I got to be sitting at the computer where I happen to load the CD. And what a huge enabler that is to deliver more functionality quicker wherever the customer wants it. And Jeff, that's exactly right. You know, from a customer's point of view, we've seen that they want all the apps to run their business. Some of those are going to come from Intuit. Some of them are going to come from a third-party. Customers don't actually care who develops it. They want high-quality apps. They want a consistent end-to-end experience and they want that integration. And so that's the thing that we're delivering to our developers. We announced a new plugin capability where if you've got a third-party app, you can make your user interface drop right into QuickBooks. You can embed into our workflow. You can change our navigation. You can even put buttons on our forms. All in service to delivering a great experience for our customers. So give me an example of that. We'll be a real-world example of, for me as a small business owner, why that would be advantageous for me. Yeah, so for example, we find that 23% of our base write a lot of checks, you know? So, do you guys like writing checks? Not one a month. All right, exactly. It's not a fun process, but we have some businesses that are writing 20, 30 checks a day. You know, hundreds of checks a month. And what we found are they're spending a lot of time writing checks where a convenient bill payment solution would really benefit them. And that's what bill.com delivers. They're a SaaS startup. They're here based in Palo Alto. They're 130 people growing like crazy. They have one of our top-rated apps, from accountants as well as customers. And what we've done working with them is found a way to drop their app directly into QuickBooks to provide that bill payment capability. So it's going to save our customers dozens of hours a week. You know, hundreds and hours a year. And that's money. That's time they can invest back into the things they like, like actually doing their business. So, giving them a great ecosystem and a lot of customers go after his nights, but you guys wanted to sweeten the pot and have some fun here at the show. So you've got something called the app showdown. I wonder if you can give us kind of, what's going on with the app showdown here at the show. And Jeff, this goes back to the question you talked about earlier on innovation. You know, Ed and Tewit, we do a lot of innovation in-house, but there's a lot of innovation happening outside our four walls with large partners as well as SaaS startups. I mean, here we've got 400 companies showing all the stuff they're delivering. Now, there's a whole branch of like new to the market, like new to the world companies. And so we created with the small business app showdown. If you publish an app between January and August, we want you to come and pitch. So we had like almost 70 apps. Were they all new? None of them existed before January? Exactly. They had to be published in our app store between January and August. And so we saw some really early startups. We also saw some like, you know, not mid-stage startups delivering a new app. We narrowed that down to 10 finalists. And I saw them yesterday. They all had lightning two minute pitches to a really top-notch judging panel. We'll find out who the winner is. I don't even know. But the winner actually gets $100,000 to invest back into their business. And this is awesome capital for these startups. And all that is part of your kind of your seeding of the ecosystem too, right? And trying to be more inclusive and to bring some new blood in, to bring new perspective. Because I would assume in that space, that's vital. You want to be attracted to, or attractive to developers who might otherwise not be thinking about small business, but somebody else might have a better mousetrap and you want them to deliver that to you. And John is right. It's exactly about maintaining that edge on innovation. So even before the small business app showed up, we did a hackathon on Saturday and Sunday, 24 hours. We had like 130 developers here, 30 different teams. And so we introduced APIs through our partners. So we had Google here with API.ai, Postman, Square, a new startup called Gibo. They have this little robot you can program. And so what we told our hackathon teams are just solve problems either for small business or non-profits. And that was like the open space. I saw teams using APIs from all of these companies. They were doing assistance. They were doing voice recognition. They were doing chat. They actually used a robot for a point of sale cashier. And that's amazing innovation that you're going to see start to appear in the ecosystem in the coming months. So what kind of listening do you do with your community? So the people you're serving? It seems as though that's a thread that we've heard throughout the company about getting that kind of feedback and being able to quickly deploy new ideas and then altering them. So what work do you do specifically to listen to those you're serving and also prospective developers to find out just what is it we're trying to solve and who's going to try and solve it? So if you go back to the origins of Intuit, we talk about ourselves as a 30-year-old startup, but back when Scott Cook was running Intuit and he's still very active today, one of the things we have is called Follow Me Homes. So we'll watch our customers. We'll actually learn from them and see their pain points and then put that back into the product. Another thing we use is Net Promoter. We'll actually do surveys and ask customers like from the promoter to the detractors, ask them for open-ended feedback. So we use all of those analytics from the Net Promoter. I meet with hundreds of developers a year, not just at the show, but we'll go meet with partners. I have a team in London, in Paris, and in Sydney. And so I've gone there and we're developers, so we do drink-ups. So over a beer, you can find lots of real feedback about and I'll ask open-ended questions like how's the platform working for you? What's working well? What's missing? So a combination of qualitative and quantitative feedback is how we actually make the platform better. I'd say a drink-up is very qualitative. I think there's no question about it. I wasn't arguing. It's very qualitative. But Scott's mentioned before that the real benefit of the Follow Me Home versus Surveys, you really learn something that the people would never necessarily report or things that they don't even know that they're necessarily doing. And he talked about the early days of Quickbook. Just, you know, it can't have instructions, which is very revolutionary back then. We used to get, you know, big giant manuals came with everything that you purchased, whether it be hardware or software. So to actually sit and watch people engage with the application and see how they actually do it, not what they report that they do. Probably get very different information. And what's great is like when you actually go visit a developer in their environment and you talk to them about like, hey, where are you spending time? Where are you getting stuck? I'm an engineer by background. You know, I used to write code. I've led engineering teams and now on the business side, like this is my space. I really know what these guys are feeling. I've walked in their shoes. So for me, there's a certain energy and wanting, you know, with my team, how do we actually solve these problems and deliver a better experience for them? Because ultimately they're going to make better products for our customers. You mentioned some of these statistics about the global reach of the operation. So when you're developing now such a diverse audience is that. United States users, Australian, Middle Eastern, Central, Europe, Eastern, whatever. I mean, how do you take into a factor and account the different uses, the different behaviors? Because I assume that commerce is different in other parts of the world than it is here in the United States. And regulations use. And you've got regulatory considerations, right? Compliance issues, security issues. So multiple factors, right? I mean, how complicated does that make your job? So the complexity in a way is actually kind of fun. So when we took QuickBooks, we took it global five years ago and we first took it to Commonwealth countries. So Canada, Australia, UK, and they have very similar practices. What we found, and then we also added India as an emerging market, what we found are, you know, accounting jobs are very similar worldwide. You know, accounting standards were actually developed in Venice in the 1700s. So double entry accounting was developed outside of the US and it's global and it's here. So we created an environment where we can support different accounting regulations. Then we added language support and we added currency support. We got to France, found that things were a little different, you know. We went to continental Europe. We've known that for a long time. It's all great. I lived in Paris for three years. I love it, you know. And then now we have a global product along the way we built a global platform. So we're supporting developers in all of those countries. Pretty amazing. What is the reach, obviously, and then the way that you've really ingrained in your practice in the developers group, which is still new to you, right? You've still, you've been there a year? A year. Yeah. You're still the new kid on the block today. New in terms of in-to at times, yes. Yeah, where are you going with this, you think, two, three years down the road as we wrap up here just some final thoughts about some things that you see on the horizon that you'd like to bring in to put maybe your personal brand on what the developers group is all about. So we're starting to talk about three themes. It's really around building high-quality applications, focusing on the end-to-end experience from a customer's point of view. But on the in-to-it developer group, we are committed to helping developers grow their business. And if there's one thing that, you know, me and my team are really committed to, is we want developers to get new customers to make money and find ways that, you know, they can actually see the platform as an opportunity to really grow their business significantly. So we've announced two integrations with build.com and T-Sheets. We're going to scale that up, but like fast forward a year. I'd like to come back to you guys with 20 new partners we brought into the ecosystem. All right, well, we'll see you a year from now. We'll see how that goes. We'll come back in 2017, check in with you then, but I'm sure success is right around the corner for you. Sounds great. And thanks for being with us. Yeah, thanks, great conversation. Enjoy the rest of the show. Well, thank you very much. It's been wonderful so far. It really has. Vinay Pai from Intuit. Back with more here from QuickBooks Connect 2016 in San Jose on theCUBE.