So there are wrist-watch devices and other nifty technology toys that were displayed this year at the Consumer Electronics Show. And this week's Big Show of the National Retail Federation was loaded with touch screen products. For a significant minority of accounting firms and small businesses, the big issue for the year is likely to be old technology, in particular the Windows XP operating system and Office 2003 suite which will not be supported after April.Those who still hang on to Windows XP generally aren't worried, according to Jim Bourke, a partner with WithumSmith+Brown, a Red Bank, N.J.-based CPA firm. Bourke says when he speaks to accountants he asks those he still have XP about their plans.
When he tells these practitioners Microsoft will no longer support those products, "They say they haven't supported it for years," Bourke relates. And the view by most of these firms is that they know how to operate the system and can deal with problems.
However, the end of support goes beyond simply fixing problems that occurs. "It goes to integration with other applications," says Bourke.
And the issue goes far beyond integration. The biggest threat is the lack of updates and patches from Microsoft.
"They are going to be using XP at their peril with security breaches becoming far more subtle" says CPA Dave Cieslak of Laguna Hills, Calif.-based Arxis Technology. Cieslak believes that there is already an enormous population of compromised computers and he says XP is still being used in areas such as ATMs and check-in terminals that leaves a significant portion of infrastructure vulnerable. Cieslak also says that patches and updates published for newer Microsoft products provide "A road a map for holes that exist in the old code."
Consultant Randy Johnston of K2 Enterprises also puts security threats high on the list of technology issues for 2014. With the theft of millions of credit cards numbers at retailer Target, attention has focused on data safety. Johnston thinks "There will be one or more cloud security breaches and there will be notable data center outages."
Johnston expects part of the problem will be alleviated by wide-scale adoption of Windows 8.1 and Office 2013 as businesses buy hardware. For people with older systems, "It's to move on" because of the likelihood of malicious attacks against older systems. But even with the newer products, "Office 365 has been intermittent" in performance, he cautions.
In fact, Johnston said the continuing data center and security problems has dampened his enthusiasm for recommending businesses move to the cloud.
Johnston also predicts a slowdown in the love affair with mobile technology. "People are past the infatuation stage with smart phones and tablets," he says. Among other trends he foresees is an increased interest in budgeting applications - "Budget tools are back with a vengeance" – and in increase in technology infrastructure projects as companies get more comfortable with the pace of economic recovery.
There have been a lot of predictions that analytical software will increase in importance in the general market, and also for the tax and accounting market. Donny Shimamoto, chairman of the American Institute of CPAs Information Management & Technology Assurance committee, expects that benchmarking and financial analysis software will become more important this year, both for accountants in public practice and for those in industry.
"As CPAs seek to add value to commodity audit and tax services, benchmarking and financial analysis software, normally used for audit analytics can instead be used to help provide benchmarking against a client's peers and to provide insights into potential financial optimization options for a client," says Shimamoto, managing director, of Honolulu, Hawaii-based IntrapriseTechKnowlogies.
He also expects increased use of workflow and project management software to providing insight into process and the progress of projects to more effectively manage resources.
Overall, the interviews with these observers suggest what many would have expected – that there the accounting community, and small business in general, is split into have and have-nots, or maybe more appropriately those who do and those who do nothing when it comes to moving to new technologies.
For those who follow the latest and hottest in technology, the two major shows this month – CES and NRF's Big Show, the massive gathering of products designed for retail – produced plenty to illustrate the trends in the overall market.
At the Big Show, these trends included touch-screen technologies and a continuing spread of mobile devices in the store. Analytics to capture and analyze consumer behavior was also prominent. Most of the products will impact accountants more in their daily lives than in business.
Among those NRF exhibitors who play in the accounting space, Retail Pro International demonstrated its Mobile 2.0 solution, Retail Pro Prism, which provides similar performance on mobile and desktop devices for use in point-of-sale systems. And Epicor's announcement of its CRM 7.0 for Retail underscores the continued growth of the importance of social media. The system segments customers from the data it has collected to enable retailers to build more personalized marketing campaigns and promotions, including loyalty programs. The Acumatica Retail Management Solution, which provides features such as POS merchant services, was introduced by its channel partner Intuitive Tek.
Microsoft showed the latest edition of the Dynamics Retail Management System The company says it features mobile commerce, catalog and call center sales, as well as advanced operations for warehousing and transportation and logistics management. The software giant also categorized the product with a term that was one of the hot phrases in retail – omni-channel, applied to the ability to a product being able to manage all of a company's sales channels, such as retail, web, and telesales.
Among the most techie trends was Microsoft's demonstration of products that utilize Kinect, the movement, voice, and gesture recognition technology that has been largely used in games. But that is changing.
Facecake Marketing Technologies demonstrated its application of Kinect in Swivel – a product it terms a Visual Demonstration System. Swivel uses cameras to recognize a shopper's body and produces an HD image that enables that person to "try on" various articles of clothing and accessories without needing to use a dressing room. Users can also select "Compare" for side by side live images of themselves in different outfits.
The system can also "skeletonize" shoppers and follow them through a store. As explained by the person doing the demo, it can help generate information about shopper habits and is also useful in security. The system also can capture shopper heart rates.
Other uses of Kinect technology shown at the Microsoft booth included products that let retailers determine how long shoppers stand in front of a display, how long it is before they touch an item and how long they hold items and presumably heart-rate information captures their level of excitement. Such information is being used in helping redesign stores.
At CES, there was a wide range of "wearables" such as Google Glass, health monitoring, game playing gloves, embedded radio signals for location finding. An array of products help home appliance talk to each other. Then there were digital health-related products as Nike's FuelBand, a wrist band that can track calories used by someone during exercise; Jawbone UP, which works with Android devices and iPhones to track daily activity and sleep efficiency and the Fitbit Force, an activity tracker and pedometer that can track steps, distance, calories, stairs and sleep.
Among the products most likely to make it into homes – high-end homes – are the 105-inch curved HD TVs from LG Electronics Samsung and Sony. For TV aficionados, the Sony is priced at $70,000 with a chunk of that price attributable to the use of OLED technology. LG stuck with LED, courtesy of improvements in that technology its 105-inch entry, whose price was not immediately available. The 55-inch curved OLED-based LG, by the way, in $10,000.
