One of the most vexing challenges facing today’s IT and business decision-makers is how to integrate critical corporate data across a widening array of on-premise and on-demand systems and applications.

Many believe that the age-old data integration issues of the past have only been compounded by today’s rapidly expanding assortment of Cloud-based solutions which raise the expectation of easy end-user access from anywhere at any time.

While there are a growing number of application program interfaces (APIs), Web-based connectors and Cloud-oriented systems integrators that are reducing the difficulty of overcoming this integration issue, it still represents an important impediment that many organizations are reluctant to face.

Intuit announced a new program yesterday aimed at addressing the data integration issue. The Intuit Anywhere program promises to give software developers a new method of extracting QuickBooks data directly into their third-party applications, including web and mobile.

This new data export and integration capability is an extension of the Intuit Partner Platform (IPP). It utilizes a set of widgets and data services to permit customers to more easily take their data generated within QuickBooks and import it into the other Intuit-ecosystem apps which help them run their businesses.

In conjunction with its unveiling of the beta program which is aimed at testing and fine-tuning the Intuit Anywhere capability, the company also announced six new IPP partners that will be participating in the beta program:

• Bill.com 
• Concur 
• eBay 
• FreshBooks 
• Mavenlink 
• MethodCRM.com

Intuit has recently been more actively promoting the scale of its Cloud business, power of its platform, and reach of its alliance partners in the market, including Microsoft and Salesforce.com.

The new Intuit Anywhere program promises to make the data captured in its Quickbooks flagship product more ubiquitous which should strengthen Intuit’s position in the market.

Intuit Microsoft PaaS Platform-as-a-Service Salesforce.com