Basware eyes Govt business with cloud invoicing

Financial software maker Basware has launched a hosted version of its invoice processing software that it hopes will make it easier to win Australian government business.

Basware CEO Esa Tihilä

The Finnish firm unveiled Alusta in a move CEO Esa Tihilä said reflects a major change in the company’s sales strategy. Alusta is Finnish for platform and the beginning, he said.

Tihilä said he was shopping the new platform to government agencies in the hope it might be adopted alongside the SAP and Oracle ERP systems embedded in many departments.

He said the presence of the big financial systems made it tough to incorporate "best-of-breed" add-ons, although he hoped being a cloud service would resolve that.

Alusta, he said, was designed to offer low-cost entry and easy integration with these back office systems.

He said that while Alusta is served from data centres in London, the United States and Finland, the company was not averse to running local servers if it was required to win government business.

“If the Government here wants services hosted in Australia, that’s fine for us,” he told iTnews.

”It’s a business decision.”

Basware has a presence in the South Australia Government but is yet to win major deals with federal or other state governments or territories.

Alusta is charged on a per-invoice basis - said to be around 50 cents - plus entry fees and monthly account maintenance charges.

Tihilä had been with Basware since 2006 but was appointed as its new CEO in October last year to drive its strategy to offer cloud-based services, especially in the electronic invoicing and automation market.