Xero receives highest award at CeBIT Australia

Last night at the CeBIT Conference in Sydney, Xero won both the Top Business Solution award as well as the ICT Excellence Award, which is the highest accolade in the Australian tech industry. We were amongst an impressive field of finalists and so we are delighted and humbled to win these coveted awards.

The ICT Excellence Award recognises excellence in the provision of a product or solution to customers and also one that can demonstrate a proven track record of success.

Accepting the IT Excellence award from Senator the Hon Kate Lundy. Photo courtesy of CeBIT Australia.

These two awards are testament to the very real and growing demand for an alternative to spreadsheets and cumbersome, traditional, accounting desktop packages in Australia.

We were joined on the evening by a number of our top accounting partners who represented just a small sample of a growing base of loyal and passionate advisors out there promoting Xero to their customers. We owe a lot of our success to this group so I want to thank each and every one of our partners who have supported us and helped us to achieve this wonderful recognition.

We also have our Add-on Partners to thank for building an ecosystem of cloud solutions that offer huge value and choice to small business customers by integrating with Xero. This was one of the factors that Gilad Greenbaum, Chief Technologist and CeBIT 2012 Curator, attributed to our successful nomination when he spoke later in the evening: “Xero’s contribution to the development of the cloud industry in the SME market has been significant. Over and above the great software that they have built themselves, I am also very impressed with the growing community of cloud ISVs that they are actively promoting within this sector. They are taking a leadership position by supporting many other innovative cloud start-ups and helping them to share in their success.”

The quiet revolution

The rest of the conference also kept us busy, with literally tens of thousands of visitors walking through the door each day. I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in a couple of speaking panels – “Beyond the cloud: what’s next?” and “Exploring the changing face of the Australian enterprise.”

The key insight I took from the discussions was that the take up of cloud computing in the small business sector sector is happening much faster than it is in other parts of the economy. Interestingly, this is largely going unnoticed, in spite of the fact that the small and medium business sector is a vitally important part of the economy. This takeup, and our success, are part of a “quiet revolution.”

Our recognition this year at CeBIT validates this assertion and makes the revolution considerably less quiet. In the future, we’ll start to see more focus and investment to promote cloud technology in the SME market. That will in turn help drive productivity gains in this key component of the economy.

We’ll be back at CeBIT in 2013 where I hope to see some of our Add-on Partners amongst the award finalists, showing the whole tech industry that small business is leading the way with the cloud.