Last week, I received a call from London. An American lawyer, based in London, with clientele in Florida was setting up a firm “in the cloud”. He was planning to use a Salesforce.com application for lawyers called AdvologixPM and an accounting service called Xero.com. After some research, we discovered there was integration between Force.com and Xero, an accounting software package offered as a SaaS model (monthly fee) and hosted out of New Zealand. After speaking to an accountant in Auckland, New Zealand, we were able to advise the client. What makes it interesting in the “multinational” nature of this engagement made possible by “The Cloud” and requiring “no software installation”, but rather the engagement of “services.”
Here was a lawyer in London, contacting a consultant in New York, to assemble a practice management suite with “case data” hosted in the U.S. on Salesforce.com and “accounting data” hosting in New Zealand, to service clients in Florida and England.
Go figure this brave new world.