In a move to compete with Salesforce.com, Amazon and Google, Intuit launched a cloud platform for 3rd party developers called Federated Applications.

Applications do not have to conform to QuickBooks but will instead go through a minor configuration process to adapt. This is a major breakthrough for reaching an international audience.

According to Leena Rao:

Intuit’s Partner Platform provides a foundation for developers to build and deploy apps that can be integrated with Intuit’s small business accounting software, QuickBooks. QuickBooks has close to 25 million users within 4 million businesses who can buy these apps on Intuit’s own version of its Salesforce.com-like App Store, Intuit Marketplace.

With the multilingual “Federated Applications” functionality, developers who have existing SaaS applications that are built with any programming language, database or cloud computing platform can quickly and easily publish their apps on Intuit Marketplace.