Ahead of Sage Transform, Kantata has announced a deeper partnership and an updated integration with Sage Intacct. Kantata will be exhibiting its professional services solutions at Transform, where the company is a Gold sponsor. The partnership sees a new listing on the Sage Intacct Marketplace for Kantata OX (formerly Mavenlink), joining the entry for Kantata SX (formerly Kimble).
The announcement indicates that Kantata now has a full partnership with Sage Intacct for both of its solutions. Intacct and Kantata are now able to service professional services organisations with a PSA solution that is suited to their industry. It delivers a choice to the customer and enables them to take advantage of whichever solution fits their organisation better.
Sage Intacct, alongside the resource management, financial management, project management, team collaboration, business intelligence, integration, and workflow automation functionality of the Kantata Cloud for Professional Services, is a powerful combination for professional services companies. The solutions will synchronise project information between them.
John Breul, Vice President of Alliances for Kantata, commented, “The combination of Kantata and Sage Intacct offers the most comprehensive range of vertical SaaS solutions purpose-built to help professional services organizations of all sizes and specialties elevate operational performance. We’re excited to work with the Sage Intacct team and empower our clients to build thriving businesses.”
The lost sheep returns?
Since the merger of Mavenlink and Kimble Applications under the banner of Kantata, the company has evolved its messaging. This announcement is the first real indication of how it will approach partnerships going forward. The press release appears to talk about and link back to Kantata OX. Enterprise Times asked Kantata how the release related to both solutions.
Charles Gustine, evangelist at Kantata responded saying “The partnership and integration strategy with Sage Intacct now encompasses the full range of Kantata offerings. Everything we’re saying in the press release pertains to both the Kantata OX and Kantata SX products, as in they are both key parts of the go-forward strategy with Sage Intacct. Both will be sold in partnership with them and will have fully supported integrations with the Intacct product.
“Also, both have their own distinct listings on the Sage Intacct marketplace. The big addition here – and the reason the piece points to the OX listing – is the addition of OX into that partnership/relationship where previously the focus had only been on SX because of the historic partnership with Kimble. “
Historically, Mavenlink did have a much closer relationship with Intacct, launching its integration in 2015. When Kimble launched its integration in 2018, the relationship between the two companies seemed to have waned. It left Kimble to build a much stronger relationship at both a technology and co-selling level. The emergence of the technology integration with Sage Intacct is, therefore, no surprise, as one already existed. With the Kantata SX team’s knowledge of Sage Intacct, they were able to bring this to market quickly.
Looking forward, the companies will create a cooperative go-to-market strategy and one that will focus on specific messaging around best practices for services businesses.
What is in the integration
Kantata is aiming to provide common messaging for its solutions, and yet there are likely to be differences between the two integrations. What it is keen to highlight are the benefits that customers will gain by deploying the Kantata Professional Services Cloud alongside Sage Intacct. These include:
- View resource supply and demand in interactive views that allow drag-and-drop fulfilment of demand
- Improve the accuracy of revenue forecasts
- Learn which projects can accelerate revenue
- Eliminate or save time on manual data entry
- Improve communication between project delivery teams, accounting, and clients and with integration to Salesforce Kantata, help with collaboration with sales teams too
- Supply accounting with visibility into when projects are created, and invoices raised and delivery teams when those invoices are paid
The combination addresses a broad range of industries within professional services, including marketing and creative agencies, IT services firms, management consultancies, architecture and engineering firms, and the embedded services divisions of product companies. In delivering the benefits, it also helps to overcome the challenges faced by these firms, which include
- Lack of visibility into talent availability or project performance
- Inability to predict resource needs over the short- and long-term
- High costs due to perpetually underutilized resources
- Wasted cycles updating systems and tracking time
Melody Williams, Sage’s Head of Business Development for Sage Intacct commented: “Sage is dedicated to helping businesses run smoothly, providing insights to make decision-making faster and more accurate. The integration between Kantata and Sage Intacct meets an important need for professional services organizations and our two companies. Sage and Kantata share the goal of offering solutions that empower our clients to be successful.”
Kantata will demonstrate the combined solution at Sage Transform next week, October 10-14, 2022, in Orlando, Florida.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
This is a significant deal. Kantata now has at least twice the importance of Kimble to Sage. The size of the organisation is significant, and it will not take long for Kantata OX to gain traction within the marketplace. There are Kantata OX partners that already work with and are Sage partners. At Transform, the rebuilding of that relationship will be welcomed. It should mean that both companies will work closer together. It also provides Kantata with a powerful solution that can compete with NetSuite and FinancialForce in the market.
As an aside, it was interesting to note that the pricing for both solutions is similar. They start at around $30,000 per year plus implementation. This is, according to Kantata, for 50 licenses each. It almost certainly signals the demise of Mavenlink attacking the SME market (something they did with a $19 pupm offer). This is a strategic and sensible change for the company, it doesn’t mean they wouldn’t consider smaller customers, but they are unlikely to chase them going forward.
