• The Value is in the Vertical. Intacct and Avectra Announce Vertical Specific Integration.

     

    SaaS applications give the ability to build very specific vertical applications that tie together several different functional areas to really meet the needs of a particular class of business. Intacct today announced an example of this “long tail” approach in action.

  • Intacct Summer 2010

     

    I recently took a briefing from Intacct (more on them here) giving me an update on their Q2 performance and also appraising me of product changes rolling out this summer. First some interesting business performance statistics. Intacct had added…

  • Intacct Winter 2010 – More Strings to the Bow

     

    Last week I had a briefing from Dan Druker, SVP Marketing from Intacct (more here) on their forthcoming winter release and a review of their 2009 performance. First a recap of the past year:

    • 80% quarter to quarter growth in Q4
    • Over 3300 customers with over 30000 users
    • Massive uptake from accounting firms with their AICPA tie up (more on that here)
    • 99.98% uptime across the year

    And now onto the product launch. Winter 2010 sees major moves in three main areas – dimensions, revenue management and employee participation. Looking at each of these in turn:

    Dimensions

    To allow for wider analytics to be run within the application before a fully fledged BI application is needed, Intacct has now has 12 completely customizable reporting dimensions within which users can generate reports. This gives very granular control over performance planning and reporting. Druker told me that they have customers who come to them with 60000 line excel spreadsheets that they are using to run the reports they need – dimensions will enable to do this within the application and in real time, without needing an external spreadsheet or a data warehouse.

    Intacct partners are already using dimensions to build vertical specific offerings – for example allowing restaurants to report based on menu item, location or server or perhaps a not for profit group to report by program, activity or contribution source.

    Revenue Management

    Druker asserts that many more businesses today are experiencing complex revenue situations with various allocation, deferral and recognition issues. This, along with the more stringent reporting and compliance situation means accurate and compliant reporting is very difficult.

    Intacct revenue management allows flexibility in terms of rules and schedules for different revenue classes and flows this through to forecasting, analysis and audit

    Employee Participation

    Until recently, generally only accounts department employees utilized Intacct. In an effort to increase the stickiness of their product, Intacct is rolling out various pieces of functionality that will encourage employee use of the product/ Specifically they know provide for:

    • Workflows for purchasing and expenses
    • User customizable workflow processes
    • A more flexible UI built on Flex that allows for contextual menus and “bookmarking” or reports for quick reference
    • Dash boards

    The employee participation is priced at $10 per user per month which is competitive with other expense management or purchasing management offerings.

    Summary

    Intacct is moving up the food chain – this latest release sees some pretty powerful functionality that will see it both broaden it’s role within existing customers and also appeal to customers larger and more complex than it’s existing pool – along with the AICPA partnership, vertically customized solutions tailored with the aid of the new dimensions feature should see them pick up significant momentum.
    CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by
  • The self professed most humble man alive gets shown the door: Sage’s CEO Kelly is no longer

     

    A few years ago I attended Sage’s global user conference in New Orleans alongside a small group of industry analysts and media folks. The event was my first experience with Sage’s then freshly minted CEO, Stephen Kelly. Kelly, who…

  • Sage channels Salesforce and goes all platform on us

     

    (And, yes, the random image with the post is indeed Sage, the herb) Interesting positioning from Sage, the vendor that, after spending years with its head in the sand, is finally jumping fully into cloudy thinking. Sage is a…

  • BillingPlatform wants to take on incumbents as well as new entrants

     

    Editorial update – the original press release from BillingPlatform was misleading – the Forrester WAVE report did not say that “BillingPlatform has a better product offering than Aria and Zuora” but that BillingPlatform outperformed Aria and Apttus in 2 out of 35…

  • FinancialForce changes: masterful move or not?

     

    This week has seen me brave a Hades-like Las Vegas (at least when it comes to temperatures) to attend FinancialForce’s CommunityLive event. The conference is the first time that FinancialForce invited media and analysts to their show and was…

  • Kenandy justifiably crows about its momentum.

     

    I was at Salesforce’s extravaganza conference back in 2011 when Kenandy, the ERP built on top of Salesforce’s platform, was unveiled. Kenandy was founded by none other than Sandra Kurtzig, someone who, it is fair to say, invented the…

  • Icertis and PROS partner to fend off the SteelBrick threat

     

    There are so many different players in the revenue and contract management space, from those focused purely on the subscription and billing aspects (Zuora, Aria and Vindicia), to the ERP vendors who believe they offer the best solution (NetSuite,…

  • Cloud Financials on the Up and Up

     

    For a long time the traditional financial vendors dismissed the cloud upstarts as little more than amateur providers that caused no challenge to their own market share – in their mind “real” businesses would still use the rock solid…