Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Peter Horadan, CTO and EVP of Engineering at Avalara (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You parameterize all these different pieces that are used in calculating the taxes. If I understood you correctly, even in a situation where merchants are selling through Amazon, Amazon will calculate the total sales tax to be collected on the transaction but when it comes to the merchant’s actual filing in all these different states and counties, you take care of all of that.

Peter Horadan: That’s exactly right. The second part is the filing. When the filing period ends, we add up all of the commercial activity. This needs to be separated out by jurisdiction. You need to file with the specific jurisdiction that the activity happened in. For most sellers, it’s every month. You have a monthly burden to file in every jurisdiction. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Peter Horadan, CTO and EVP of Engineering at Avalara (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: If you look at the space, what are the emerging trends in e-commerce you see that are creating more pressure on this kind of real-time tax calculation?

Peter Horadan: One example is a customer of ours. They’re an online Amazon seller. They started using Amazon to manage their inventory. It’s a program called Fulfilment by Amazon. The interesting thing about that is, Amazon will then distribute your inventory to multiple states, which gives you an obligation to collect and remit sales tax in those states. They’re a Washington-based business but they quickly had to file taxes in 17 different states. It had previously taken them eight hours to manually prepare just the Washington return. After using our system, they’re spending one hour a month for filing in 17 different states. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Peter Horadan, CTO and EVP of Engineering at Avalara (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Automated tax filing has been around for a long time. I did a story on Sabrix. That must have been 2007. We are in 2016.

Peter Horadan: You’re right. It has been around for quite some time. One of the things we find amazing is that it has not yet been automated. Most companies are still dealing with transactional taxes manually. There is a lot of opportunity to help customers by automating this. When you’re going after trends, there’s a couple that are related to each other to make this an interesting space. The first is the incredible growth of online sales. Forester estimates over $350 billion in online sales this year.

Online selling continues to grow. Beyond that, businesses of all types are realizing that they need a multi-channel strategy. We’ve seen pure play digital >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Peter Horadan, CTO and EVP of Engineering at Avalara (Part 1)

The increasing adoption of electronic commerce and the related national/global nature of the business has created challenges for merchants on the tax calculation and filing front. Read on to learn more.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to Avalara and yourself.

Peter Horadan: I’m EVP of Engineering and CTO for Avalara. We help customers with managing their transactional tax. That includes sales tax, VAT, or GST. Our business is to deal with the staggering complexity of dealing with transactional taxes so our customers can get back to business.

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about your customers? What kind of customers use this technology? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Himanshu Palsule, CTO of Epicor Software (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: It’s very similar to the strategy that you’re following, but with a very different segment. You’re working in the $50 million to $500 million segment. They are working in the very small business segment. Their end customer is the 5 to 10 people company. A lot of what he is interested in doing is having these vertical value-added resellers build on top of his ERP.

You’re seeing the verticalized cloud trend everywhere. The only way to get to that is through these partner networks.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Himanshu Palsule, CTO of Epicor Software (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to ask the previous question a slightly different way and see if I get a different answer from you. If you were starting a new company in vertical cloud, what would you start? What might be an are where you would dig to find an opportunity?

Himanshu Palsule: Let me step back and say this. Most providers, Epicor included, rely on the ecosystem to complete that last mile from the customer’s office into the cloud. While cloud has been able to outsource a lot of the complexity from the business, the services area still remains a premium. We’ve seen cloud services revenue go up in some of the research I’ve looked at even as more and more costs are being driven down. If I were starting a company or advising someone to start a company, I would look at the services arena. It could be consulting services. It could be web services. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Himanshu Palsule, CTO of Epicor Software (Part 3)

Himanshu Palsule: Until the entire ecosystem was ready, those people weren’t as ready as the person who did CRM on Salesforce 10 years ago. I think the key drivers that are tipping this over are largely that our industry goes through a chain cycle for ERP. It used to be five to seven years. Now it’s moved to 7 to 10 years. Every 7 to 10 years, the systems are no longer supported. Y2K saw a big change in the ERP. Companies are now looking out for newer systems and they’re driven by cost of ownership. The concerns around security have largely been alleviated. They’re looking for an instant on. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Himanshu Palsule, CTO of Epicor Software (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How is your product architected? Do you have a broad horizontal platform and do you then do these customizations on top of that?

Himanshu Palsule: Largely. We have a broad portfolio of products. We have quite a few ERP products across the world. Typically, the product that we’ll end up talking about is a product like Epicor ERP E10, which is part of our flagship product. There are other products like Scala and Eagle that play in specific verticals. To answer your question, E10 is built on a platform and an architecture that allows it to scale. This product is available in multi-tenant SaaS and is available across 35 countries supporting local tax legislation. >>>