Wednesday 23rd January, 2012

Over the last couple of years Tradeshift's growth has been astronomical. In that short space of time, Tradeshift has connected over 150,000 businesses. And from today, that figure will take a substantial leap forward with the annoucement that the company has entered into a new partnership with Intuit, who gain a seat on the Tradeshift board. The parnership will connect the five million businesses who use QuickBooks onto Tradeshift, and in the words of Tradeshift co-founder and CEO Christain Lanng;  "create the largest network of companies on one platform that the world has ever seen." Those in the UK will have the added benefit of being the first to be able to take advantage of the new partnership via a free ap connecting the two companies.

"And why does this matter?" asks Christian Lanng.  "Scale. The value of any communications network increases directly in proportion to the number of users -- and when it reaches a point where it includes most of the people you want to interact with, something amazing happens. Skype, Facebook, Linkedin; all these platforms are successful because they have critical mass."

Today is a giant leap toward Tradeshift joining that lineup.

The millions of companies who choose QuickBooks to give them confidence, insight and new opportunities from financial data will now enjoy the same experience around external business interactions using Tradeshift. They’ll be able to get paid faster via Tradeshift Instant Payments and add new business processes using Tradeshift Apps.

With the organisation's commitment to open standards, it seems likely that Tradeshift will become an even more appealing environment for developers and partners to create and sell Apps, especially with the scale that this new partnership has given. And that opens the door to running any business process on the platform and, in time, feeding more data back into Quickbooks too - hinting at the "big data" style benefits set to dominate the landscape this year.

Interestingly, it seems that this is just the start of things to come for Tradeshift in 2013 as the organisation hints at bigger news this year, and in fact bigger news for the company in the next couple of months.