At the Acumatica Summit CEO John Case revealed several announcements to the 3,000 attendees at this event. He first reaffirmed that Acumatica focuses on supporting small to medium-sized enterprises. Case spoke about the current economic situation. Revealing that Acumatica believes that there is great optimism in the sector, citing a recent survey, “over 59% of small, medium businesses in the US believe the business environment is improving, and 2024 and two-thirds expect their revenues to increase this year.”
He also revealed, without giving any numbers, that Acumatica also achieved a record 2023. Breaking all targets and growing the partner ecosystem. He cited a PWC survey that noted 57% of CEOs said that technology will be the single biggest driver of value creation.
Case commented, “In this environment of optimism and dramatic technological advancements, we see great opportunities in the market and are moving forward aggressively. While we are excited about where we are now and the company’s growth, our ambitions are high, and we are just getting started. As we enter this new era, it’s paramount that we retain our uniqueness, which is anchored in our customer-focused Community.”
Case then made three major announcements. Acumatica will extend its portfolio with a new professional services solution. Where many probably expected a major announcement around generative AI, Acumatica is taking a measured approach. Case revealed that the firm would first announce a set of principles that the firm adheres to in its development of technology. The third announcement was a new logo for a more modern look and feel to reflect the huge changes that have happened.
Case commented, “This new look and feel is the embodiment of this new era. It’s clearly grounded in our past. But it’s an evolution to this new forward-looking vision and the clarity of our purpose and direction.”
Principles of Innovation
Ali Jani, Chief Product Officer at Acumatica, then took to the stage, revealing the principles of innovation that Acumatica would shortly publish. These underpin how Acumatica builds all its technology. In a similar way to the bill of rights it published last year this codifies the Acumatica thinking and demonstrates a commitment.
Jani revealed that the principles will have three core pillars of guardrails, practical and valuable, explaining:
Security: “We will always make sure that your data is safe. For example, we will implement extensive security and privacy measures in all our SaaS solutions to protect your data privacy and ensure your data is never compromised.”
Practical: “It has to be practical. That’s very important to us. We will always put emphasis on solving real-world problems and needs. Capabilities will be designed to ensure transparency and clarity, so users are always aware of risks, capabilities, and limitations of AI-enabled features.”
Valuable: “They will all always have to be valuable. This will ensure that enhancements are primarily driven by customer input. That means that capabilities will truly enable our customers to overcome their challenges and realise tomorrow’s possibilities.”
Jani then revealed that Acumatica is gearing up for a new era of product development. However, guided by the three pillars, it also ensures that it focuses less on the hype of generative AI and more on delivering practical solutions that deliver value.
Professional Services Edition
Jani also revealed that the next sector targeted by Acumatica would be professional services. This is a huge sector and it will be interesting to see how this impacts the PSA market. There are a lot of firms out there, but many look to purchase PSA solutions or work management solutions. Where Acumatica stands out is that it will be a complete business solution for professional services firms.
Jani revealed that, “It’s going to be built on top of our project accounting, (with) robust billing and scheduling capabilities. The Professional Services edition will include many hundreds of new features. It will enable our customers to better service their clients and manage the entire lifecycle of their customers all from start to finish in one system.”
The product will be generally available later. It will be interesting to see what direction they go in and which industries this is focused on.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
There were some big announcements on stage at Summit. With the product keynote due later today this was just the warmup. However, the professional services product announcement went down well.
There were also customer awards handed out with Portacool, Texas-based portable cooling solution manufacturer winning customer of the year. The firm suffered a major fire in 2023 and recovered with the help of Acumatica. Spinning up its business with the help of the cloud ERP it had deployed a few years previously. Recognising the difficulties the firm was going through, Acumatica also suspended costs for three months during its crisis despite its increased need for the ERP solution.
This was a good keynote from Acumatica. And refreshingly, it did not spend a huge amount of time on the rebrand, which is more iterative than new. There is more to come from the ERP vendor.
