CCH vice president of sales Ray Barlow wrapped up the companys sixth user conference in Orlando on Wednesday with a description of some of CCHs plans for further development of its Web-based and on-premise products.
He noted that the company is continuing to invest in what it calls its foundation products, the traditional on-premise products that use a customers own servers instead of running over the Internet. However, the company has also been pushing into the Software as a Service, or cloud computing, market with its SaaS Suite. CCH has already built a client portal for the online suite of products and invested $24 million on enhancements to its tax products, spending more on the tax software than in the past 10 years. Barlow assured attendees that CCH would continue to invest at this level.
The company is also building point-to-point integration, integrating from its tax products to its Workstream workflow software. Barlow said CCH plans to keep ProSystem fx Portal and ProSystem fx Workstream in the cloud and doesnt plan to bring it on-premise. However, the release of the next generation of the document management product, ProSystem fx Document, will be on-premise.
Another area of development is Microsoft .Net technology for Web-based services. CCH plans to release the next version of its audit engagement software, ProSystem fx Engagement 7.0, in the .Net framework. CCH president and CEO Mike Sabbatis said at the conference on Tuesday that he meets on a monthly basis with Microsoft and IBM.
Barlow also reflected back on this years user conference, showing video highlights of the parties and golf games, clips from the keynote speeches, and testimonials from attendees during the past several days. The conference has been CCHs biggest ever. Its always been our goal to create a community, where you can learn from others and share insights and information, and to network with your peers, said Barlow.
He also looked ahead to the 2011 conference, which is scheduled to take place in San Antonio, Texas, next November.
