Last week, we gave a briefing to Dale Vile of analyst group Freeform Dynamics. Dale understands the on-demand space very well and was genuinely taken with the maturity and depth of FreeAgent.

This is what he had to say on The Register, one of the UK's most-read IT sites, following our conversation:

Interestingly, if you look at service provider authored SaaS applications in this way, i.e. by asking what new they bring to the party in terms of capability, then the SaaS delivery element sometimes becomes a bit of red herring.

Will offerings like FreeAgent, for example, be successful because they are SaaS-based or because they fill a gap? – in this case the need for 'cut the crap' accounting, billing and tax management designed for IT contractors and the like that are not well served by traditional players like Sage.

For us, the fact that we are online is critical. The kind of things we have planned would just be impossible if we were writing desktop software.

Stay tuned!