A year ago there was great excitement among small software suppliers providing niche applications.

The ICAEW’s Practice Software Suppliers Forum had just agreed to the extensible practice standard (xPS), which would allow practitioners to swap software suppliers without concerns over their own data.

But things have gone very quiet on the xPS front.

Rumours have circulated that the larger software suppliers were not implementing xPS as enthusiastically as they could, for fear of opening up competition.

Despite the concerns in the industry, others have argued that so far everything seems to have gone smoothly.

Paul Booth, technical manager at the ICAEW, said he had 'no reason not to be happy'.

And Simon Crompton, general manager of MYOB, said that his company was happy to apply xPS to its products as generally customers preferred buying software suites over specialised applications.

But the progress that has been made on xPS does not mean that there are no clouds building on the horizon.