I’ve written several times in the past about Acumatica – the little ERP vendor who could. First to roll out on Azure, one of the first to embrace a dual on-prem/cloud strategy and one of the few to buck the direct sales channel, Acumatica have a history of doing things differently.
Keeping up the momentum, Acumatica announced recently integrations with Adaptive Planning, Avalara, Pacejet, and SIPD. The integrations will create an aggregated application that includes financial forecasting and budgeting, tax calculation and filing, sales and invoicing, and EDI for distribution and shipping.
I get excited when vendors contact me with tales of vertical integrations, it’s an example of a realization that, despite rich APIs, a pre-configured integration will always make life easier for businesses. The 60 or so VARs that Acumatica has worldwide will now be able to offer more compelling propositions.
Already Acumatica has over 60 VARs worldwide, who have embraced the cloud by selling solutions provided by the Company and its partners. The latest ISV partnerships really underscore the opportunity to reach global companies with complex requirements. That these companies can also have an on-prem to cloud solution is an added bonus.
These integrations highlight that, while ERP vendors can provide basic functionality for things like shipping, tax and budgeting, many mid-sized businesses still need best-of-breed apps that are integrated tightly with their financials. The fact that ISVs can take a pre-integrated host of solutions, and customize them further, is an endorsement of this approach.
Obviously these integrations are easy or other vendors to emulate, be it NetSuite, FinancialForce or Intacct. The question here is how attractive the option of being able to move backwards and forwards between on-prem and cloud based will be for customers – that’s Acumatica’s main differentiating feature and one they’ll hope is desired by businesses.
