Xero

Xero is rewiring the small business economy as we know it, making accounting more efficient, more productive and more useful to Xero’s customers and the millions of businesses worldwide who have not yet accessed the Cloud.

Xero has changed the game for small business. Its cloud-based accounting software connects people with the right numbers anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Founded in New Zealand in 2006, innovation has been at the heart of its continued success.

The Wellington based company is now on course to becoming a billion dollar business with one million customers across more than 180 countries, a goal it hopes to reach by next year.

To get there it has moved its platform onto Amazon Web Services, a transition Xero calls its ‘next evolution’. By using the on-demand computing power of AWS, Xero can release new software more rapidly, scale to meet times of high user demand and grow millions of subscribers globally.

Accounting software born in cloud computing

Xero’s Chief Platform Officer Duncan Ritchie, explained that as Xero is continuing to grow its customer base, they need to scale their platform to provide customers with a fast, secure and easily accessible cloud platform they can access anytime, from any device connected to the internet.

“We wanted to develop our hosting platform to support the next wave of growth, eliminate scheduled downtime, improve data protection, reduce our per customer cost and further maintain and improve our security.”

Since June 2016, Xero has managed the data migration to a new platform which has been built on AWS. The comprehensive migration was necessary to support the company’s ambitions and keep it agile and innovative.

“We’ve been closely following the progress of providers delivering Platform as a Service, while our platform usage has been growing significantly. Our expertise and experimentation in this area led us to identify AWS as the best solution to grow,” said Ritchie. “It wasn’t an easy decision, but one we knew we had to make to set Xero and all of our customers up for future growth.”

Although Xero was born in the cloud, the data migration has been a significant one.

“This has enabled us to innovate rapidly and ensure we are constantly able to grow as more small businesses and accounting partners around the world join our community.”

The transition had to be completed with minimum disruption to customers.

“We know most of our 700,000 plus customers did not notice a thing, since we carefully planned it when everyone was having a sleep in on a Sunday morning in Australia and New Zealand,” Ritchie said.

Innovation accelerates the business growth

With the shift now complete, this change is allowing Xero to set the innovation agenda for the industry.

One example has been getting customers’ bank feeds automatically loaded into Xero first thing in the morning.

“If we are running 20 to 50 servers, that process might take two to three hours,” explains Rod Drury, CEO at Xero. “In the AWS environment, we can just spin up 200 servers to do the work, turn it off, and just pay for the time used.”

It also means Xero can maintain its development cadence. More than 1,200 product updates and features were delivered in the last year, plus integrations with 400 plus add-on applications allowing people to customize Xero to their needs.

The next phase of this migration is machine learning and AI, Drury says. He notes how AWS had put big data tools right inside their datacentres.

“We can turn on a whole lot of services using these tools,” he says. “Automation and machine learning are driving a significant transformation in the accounting sector. They will fundamentally change the accounting software experience. We are just scratching the service and it will redefine accounting in coming years.”

Working with AWS is helping Xero meet the demands of a hyper-growth business, and continue to push the boundaries of technology, business, and policy.

“Xero is rewiring the small business economy as we know it, making accounting more efficient, more productive and more useful to Xero’s customers and the millions of businesses worldwide who have not yet accessed the Cloud.  Our move to AWS will lift our pace of innovation. We’re more excited than ever,” says Dury.