It’s been six months or so since I spoke with mid-market ERP vendor Acumatica (much more on them here) so I was please to spend some time with them last week getting an update about how they’re going. As a reminder Acumatica is an interesting ERP vendor whose main differentiator is that they’re focused on giving customers flexibility around deployment; Acumatica is sold either as a fully managed SaaS offering or alternatively on a license fee basis.
Since I last spoke to them, Acumatica have invested strongly in building out vertical offerings, or supporting third party ISVs to build vertical offerings. This has resulted in some interesting customer metrics, Acumatica customer numbers, be vertical, look like this;
- Wholesale distribution (50% of customers)
- Software companies, telecom and hosting (20%)
- Professional services (10%)
- Nonprofits (5%)
- Government (5%)
- Manufacturing (5%)
- Other (5%)
That distribution vertical number is massive and particularly interesting given the demo we all watched of the NetSuite integration partner eBIZnet solution at SuiteWorld recently. The eBIZnet distribution management solution was really compelling, both for its own sake and as an example of just how enabling the convergence of cloud/mobile/social can be. I was genuinely interested then to see the strong success Acumatica has in this area too.
In my discussions with Acumatica I was surprised to hear that 76% of their customers buy licenses while only 24% are on a fully managed SaaS solution. As an evangelist for all things Cloud, I believe one of the real benefits of SaaS is the freeing up of internal resources. To really realize this benefit organizations should take a route that abstracts as much responsibility away from themselves – in a situation where one option is an annual license fee and maintaining responsibility for patching, infrastructure and maintenance and the other is a simply all-inclusive monthly fee, it surprises me that the latter option isn’t significantly more popular. The joys of cloud adoption barriers I guess.
Anyway – moving on from that, Acumatica is proud of the fact that it has picked up over 100 resellers to date – some of these are simple resellers while others are building specialist solutions on top of Acumatica. Some partnerships of note;
- JAMS Manufacturing for Acumatica
- JAAS Systems partnership
- BV Commerce for Acumatica
- Avalara Tax Tables
- FusionPOS
- Gulfstream Barcode Gateway
And Acumatica reports that there is more coming up – the next few months should see them roll out project accounting and intercompany transactions – both of which are an answer to specific NetSuite functionality, OpenAir in the case of PSA and the core NetSuite offering in the case of intercompany transactions. This functionality, coupled with the partnerships already announced, see Acumatica broaden their offering and head squarely up the food chain – looking for bigger deals from bigger organizations.
