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Intuit Inc. is reinventing itself — but much of the push for change isn’t coming from company headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. It’s coming out of an office building in Waltham, where about 140 employees are probing areas that have never been seen as part of the company’s core strengths.
This is the heart of Intuit’s efforts to “blur the line” between its shrinkwrapped software, like Quickbooks and TurboTax, and a battery of new web-based offerings.
Ideally, these products will change markets, said Bill Lucchini, who moved from California two years ago to run the Waltham office. “(The idea is,) once people use them, they can’t imagine going back to the old way of doing things,” said Lucchini, Intuit vice president and general manager of the company’s “platform as a service group.”
Intuit (Nasdaq: INTU) bets some of those ideas will take shape inside its Innovation Lab unit, established in the Waltham office in 2002. Its latest project, ViewMyPaycheck, lets employees print pay stubs and find out online how much vacation time they have. Other services have ranged further afield.
Thumbstrips, a recently launched extension to Mozilla’s Firefox browser, displays recently viewed pages in a strip of thumbnails. It’s not likely ever to be monetized, acknowledged Innovation Labs group manager Tara Tarapata. “ThumbStrips has been a great way for us to learn about launching apps quickly and outside our core domain, learn from customers and iterate quickly,” she said.
Last week, a blog post announced the company will shut down another new product, Echominder, in March, due to lack of a fit with any of Intuit’s business units. The free service, also developed at the Innovation Lab, turns a cell phone into a dictaphone, recording a spoken “note to self” and redelivering it at the appointed time as a voicemail.
It’s not uncommon for companies to locate their most experimental projects away from headquarters — “out in the cornfield,” said Peter Polachi, partner at the Framingham-based technology recruitment firm Polachi Inc. “They’re far away from the bureaucracy of corporate to spur creativity,” he said.
In Intuit’s case there are other reasons. The company’s Quickbase unit was founded on technology acquired from the Massachusetts company 1Base in the late 1990s.
Waltham is also aiming to cover any markets the company can’t do on its own. The Intuit Partner Platform, launched here in November, provides a web-based data sync designed to allow third-party Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications to mash up Quickbooks data. One of the first applications, built by a mapping software maker, analyzes patterns in customer location.
“We’re never going to develop an application like this,” business leader Alex Chriss said of the mapping tool. Without the partner platform, it’s a capability Intuit’s small to midsize business customers would likely never have, he said.
Intuit may find it hard making transitions to a service-based business model, said SaaS consultant Jeff Kaplan of ThinkStrategies in Wellesley. But its customer base and brand recognition are an asset. “These are particularly important in today’s economy,” Kaplan said. “Customers are going to be very apprehensive about doing business with any vendor who they don’t know or don’t have confidence will survive.”
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