Anybody who knows me knows I’m a passionate guy when it comes to technology that can help our customers.
Excited. Energized. On fire.
But, you know, not everything in this industry gets me excited these days. I was excited during Acumatica Summit 2018
Attending this event made me feel like part of something… living, growing; with its own spirit. Something moving in the right direction. Something worth getting excited over.
We’re a new Acumatica partner, and our first Summit was last year. But the changes in the event, in only 12 months, are nothing short of amazing, and evidence of big things to come.
First, the attendance. Like night and day. They say attendance was up 50%, but it sure felt like double. WOW! They welcomed 61 new VARs and 31 new ISV partners, which definitely adds dynamism to the atmosphere. And a lot of the CAL team came down – it was great to share in the excitement together.
But here’s what really gets me going about Acumatica – cutting edge technology. It removes the chains, the barriers, the limitations that were holding you back on other platforms. I see lots of ISVs with really innovative ideas, and I believe that’s in large part due to the underlying core platform of Acumatica.
And there’s something else I latched on to – technology investment. What holds a product back is when investments aren’t made to keep up with changing trends. How people consume information is constantly evolving, and failing to adapt means failing to meet your clients’ needs. I’ll use my Great Plains experiences as an example. I could honestly see that even as early as 2007 or 2008 that Microsoft wasn’t investing in the product itself – they were investing in making GP work with their stuff, with Excel and Word and the rest of the “Microsoft stack”. Even though that was not always the best tool to use. You know, rather than investing in a new report writer, they took it out and tethered it to Word instead… and brought all the limitations of a word processing platform. They did buy a field service system a while back… and did nothing with it. There’s not even an eCommerce edition.
What’s Acumatica doing differently? 75%. That’s the percentage of their employees that are developers. Now there’s a commitment to progress and investment! They’re Commerce Edition, Field Services Edition, Manufacturing Edition… and they continued to expand behind closed doors, just recently . I feel this really says something about the future of the company and the product – like working with this company brings endless possibilities.
And then there’s the feature / code sharing between editions. Here’s a story. Back in October, when Acumatica 2017 R2 came out, we were already knee-deep in a project when we found out about the new Pro Forma Invoice. Now before, in order to set up projects, you had to tie into “allocation rules.” They made things pretty complicated… Well 2017 R2 came out and they said, “No, we’re not going to force you to do allocation rules anymore. And by the way, we’re going to give you this ability to preview the invoice and make adjustments before you actually post.” Huge improvements! Although we had done a lot of testing under the old version, we decided to back up and pull in these new features.
Now here’s the kicker: About two months later, we found out that the now-released Construction Edition was the reason those things got put in there, and yet they shared them with the entire platform.
So when I was at Summit, I asked, “Is this Construction Edition a separate set of code?” And they said, “Oh, no, we don’t get into the core.” Let me tell you, that’s going to pay so many dividends going forward. Like Change Orders. We know that’s something only in the Construction Edition right now, but I totally see that making its way into all editions.
These kinds of things get me excited. It’s like everything is fresh and new, and the sky’s the limit with what we can do for our customers. I’m already psyched for next year’s in Houston, TX! I can’t wait to see what new innovations are in store. And some Texas barbecue.
If you are want an ERP system you can get excited about, let’s talk about Acumatica Cloud ERP. Contact CAL Business Solutions at 860-485-0910 or sales@calszone.com
By George Mackiewicz, President, CAL Business Solutions,
