John Case, CEO of Acumatica, kicked off the keynote at its annual summit with a celebration of achievements by the company over the last year. It is nearly a year since Case joined Acumatica as CEO. He has spent much of the year talking to staff, partners and customers, travelling worldwide to do so. Case opened the conference by saying that the company had been internally working on a new rallying cry – “building the future of business together”. He added, “It symbolises all of these things that make our joint effort unique.”
That joint effort will bring customers, partners and employees together to meet the challenges that business face in the coming year. Case revealed those challenges, citing a recent survey of 700 small and medium-sized businesses in the US. They include inflation, the threat of a recession, supply chain challenges and talent shortages. Acumatica aims to help those companies facing these challenges alongside its community.
Case commented, “The Summit is a key touchpoint in an ongoing dialogue that takes place throughout the year in community forums, in meetings and at events. It’s the voices of our customers that drive us all forward in everything we do. Summit is a great opportunity to learn from the entire community – our customers, our partners, our people.”
In some ways, it was disappointing that the keynote focused more on the US region rather than a global one, considering the breadth of Acumatica deployments. With more than 2,800 customers, partners, press, analysts and employees attending the event, Case also revealed that Acumatica now has more than 10,000 customers worldwide. This significant milestone announcement was accompanied by an update to the Acumatica Bill of Rights that was announced in 2019. This year, Case revealed that it had updated it.
Updated Bill of Rights
Acumatica published a blog that outlines the 10 rights that customers have, explaining in more detail what each means. The basic ten are:
- A software and services proposal with clear fee structures, and no surprises.
- Unlimited user access without having to purchase user licenses.
- Fully adapt and customize the solution to meet your evolving business requirements.
- Transparent, fair pricing and agreements without long-term commitments.
- Deploy the solution on a public or private cloud.
- An open platform with robust APIs to rapidly integrate your other systems.
- A complete security model that covers your application access, data, reports, and devices.
- Own and access your data, now and always—in full, usable data formats.
- Take advantage of all knowledge and resources developed across a broad community of employees, partners, and customers.
- Professional online training that is free and comprehensive.
During the keynote, Case highlighted some of the changes to the list. He said, “We’ve clarified certain things like, for example, we believe you own your data and usable models now and forever. And we’ve kept many of the things that made it so good in the first wave. Things like no great agreement with no hidden fees.”
Customer-first
The Acumatica leadership also introduced three customers that have implemented Acumatica recently. Their stories were noteworthy. What was enlightening was the part played by the Acumatica partners in each of them.
Tatiana Frierson, Chief Executive Officer of Inspirus (A Sodexo Company), explained how she first looked to replace a 38-year-old green screen accounting application when she joined the company. Inspirus considered SAP, NetSuite, Sage, Acumatica and others but selected Acumatica. Frirson explained the decision, saying, “AccuMatica had an intuitive design. It checked the box in terms of enterprise scalability, and its flexible pricing model really was a perfect fit for where we were in our journey to help evolve and transform our business.”
Frierson also noted the support of Gold Acumatica partner AIM Solutions in making the deployment a success. This involvement and importance of partners in their customer interviews is what sets Acumatica aside from many other vendors. It was refreshing to see.
Two other customers were interviewed on stage, with Avante Health Solutions winning Customer of the Year. Khan Tran, chief technology officer at Avante Health Solutions, said, “Acumatica was the catalyst that helped us to reimagine our business services to better serve our customer. With the introduction of this digital superstructure founded on Acumatica, we started our digital transformation journey with a single consolidated system of action, not just insight.
“This allowed us to continue to operate separately among our many business units, while presenting ourselves as one Avante, with a holistic and unified view of our customer. This is very critical as we continue to grow our business, streamline operation and processes. In some cases, we were able to achieve over 50% efficiency gain.“
LifeSource won Impact Customer of the Year, with Kelly White, CEO of LifeSource, commenting, “Acumatica was easy for our entire team to learn, and it’s also affordable. I love that the product will grow with us as our organization size grows to save more lives. If you’re looking for ways to become more efficient, don’t wait any longer to find the right solution.”
On product
The keynote later today, Day Two, will be dedicated to product updates. However, Mike Shchelkonogov, Founder & Chief Technology Officer of Acumatica, gave a brief taster demonstration of what Acumatica is working on with its UI. He demonstrated that a sales order screen could be personalised on the fly by simply and quickly removing and adding fields from the screen, including custom fields. The potential is huge and was welcomed rapturously by the audience.
Ali Jani, Chief Product Officer of Acumatica, then spoke with Case about the evolution of ERP. He explained that everyone, not just finance, uses modern ERPs. He reaffirmed the importance of the community, with more than 200 ideas making their way into the product. One of these is side panels, Jani explained:
“Side panels are, you can be on any screen, and any user can go in and say, ‘You know what, on this screen that I’m looking at, maybe it’s an invoice screen’, and on invoice screen, they can add a side panel, and they can put what relevant information they want to see for themselves. Maybe they want to know the customer’s purchase history, maybe, profitability, and so on. Side panels are a really good example of it allows people to imagine and add what they want without having to go through bottlenecks.”
In the future, side panels will react in real-time as a user moves through the main screen, for example, moving between different order lines.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
At an hour, the keynote was packed with a range of information and updates. These ranged from a brief thought leadership talk by Shchelkonogov about the modern ERP to the company update and customer stories. It did not go into great detail but offered a feel of where Acumatica is and where it is going.
Case also revealed that the company would invest more in sports sponsorship, having seen positive results. He announced that it would sponsor Jessica Korda, who is currently ranked 18th in the LPGA Rolex rankings.
The main message from the summit is that Case will continue to build Acumatica through its close-knit community. It is a very active forum. Unusually, it allows prospects to join, demonstrating an openness rarely seen in the industry. Also, updating and reaffirming the Bill of Rights sets another example in the software industry. Many vendors talk about delivering customer success, but few have documented their commitment similarly.
