So Wolters Kluwer has acquired Twinfield, the Netherlands based online accounting provider. Wolters Kluwer who have CCH, the current owners of what was Viztopia, in their stable have made the first foray into the Cloud acquisition arena – others will surely follow.

Twinfield, whilst a major player in the Netherlands, was always a bit of an enigma as far as the UK market was concerned. A fully featured product, it never really acclimatised itself to the UK market despite constant plans to do so. It did, however, show what a fully featured cloud product can aspire to even though it might not have been as user friendly as some of its competitors. I suspect that this will now change and that Wolters will ensure that it fits in with its UK offerings.

As for the UK cloud market as a whole, this acquisition will, of course, raise awareness and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we didn’t hear of some further acquisitions in the coming months. Iris’s foray  with its investment into Freeagent was a start but I suspect that the market will hot up as on premise providers finally get the message that the Cloud is the way forward.

Whether it will be a good development as a whole remains to be seen. After all the flexibility of being able to use many Cloud solutions has always been one of its many advantages and tying a Cloud product to one particular on premise solution may not be to everyone’s advantage.

What it does do is enforce the message that the Cloud is here to stay.