Acumatica Summit 2024 focused on Acumatica’s growth in technology, community, and strategy. In Australia, Acumatic is licensed to MYOB and is marketed as MYOB Enterprise. Acumatica’s CEO John Case opened the event, reiterating their commitment to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). In this article we share the key topics covered in the the Summit covered including customer growth, partnerships, and the newly-introduced Professional Services Edition.
About Acumatica (MYOB Enterprise)
Acumatica, a cloud-based ERP vendor with the product of the same name designed for midmarket firms. The platform supports financial administration, CRM, project accounting, reporting, business intelligence, inventory, and warehouse management. The vendor offers industry-specific solutions for construction, distribution, manufacturing, and retail. The platform’s architecture simplifies integration with current tools and systems, with a stated emphasis on modern, cross-module workflows and data accessibility from any device.
Globally, over 350 Value Added Resellers (VARs) deliver customised deployment and support for the software although in Australia and New Zealand Acumatica is distributed by MYOB as the MYOB Enterprise product, suitable for growing mid-market as well as production-centric enterprises.
Summit Keynote
CEO John Case opened the Summit with a speech on Acumatica’s client growth, new collaborations, and international expansion. Acumatica will continue to target SMBs with $5-$100M in revenue, Case said. Technology was crucial to helping organisations innovate and overcome problems. Case highlighted SMB Group survey findings on SMB difficulties and possibilities, including labour shortages, supply chain issues, and the necessity of technology adaptation.
Case claims the private company has over 10,000 accounts and 25%+ year-over-year growth. In recent years, Acumatica has focused on establishing industry editions, and most of its new customers acquire vertical solutions.
The company said that its Professional Services Edition, forthcoming in 2024, will follow this path. Based on Acumatica’s project accounting, billing, and scheduling features, it will assist these companies manage the whole client engagement lifecycle. Case highlighted the rising company partner channel. Acumatica now sources over half of its new agreements from partners after intensive partner mapping to align VAR expertise and coverage with its target industries and markets.
No keynote is complete without AI. Acumatica, like many technology vendors, sees it as a lucrative potential. Generative AI is helping the company build and support several hundred AI initiatives. Acumatica Chief Product Officer Ali Jani said many of these projects may not be included if they don’t efficiently and responsibly solve customers’ problems.
Community interaction is another Acumatica priority. ERP is more than software, and the Acumatica Community provides 24/7 monitoring, proactive support, and a secure, elastic infrastructure, according to Global Support VP Aliya Rakimgulova. Acumatica’s 22,000-member community shows its achievement in creating a supporting ecosystem with user groups, webinars, and training.
Customer Highlights
To demonstrate how Acumatica solutions are transforming SMBs, executives discussed the company’s strategic direction and product improvements and highlighted clients. While no Australian or New Zealand customers were highlighted, the focus was on customers within the North American and EMEA markets with key innovations.
Chief Revenue Officer Sanket Akerkar explained how Acumatica’s built-in scalability, growth-friendly licencing, and global capabilities can aid SMBs, as seen by Telesis’ success. Telesis, a corporation with five businesses spanning data protection to hydroponics, used Excel and point solutions before adopting Acumatica. Double and triple data entry issues slowed progress. Telesis has grown its legacy companies and launched its hydroponics venture easier since switching to Acumatica’s integrated ERP. Dashboards and side panels assist them make better judgements by showing how each firm is doing.
The licencing model is Telesis’ favourite aspect of Acumatica. Acumatica’s price plan is dependent on application usage, transaction volumes, and deployment technique, unlike most SaaS vendors who charge per user. Acumatica lets customers add users as needed without limiting the quantity. Acumatica helps 52% of Telesis employees receive more value from the solution.
Technology Directions
Ali Jani’s presented Acumatica’s future technology, including a new user interface, speed optimisation, and AI and machine learning for decision support and automation. Customer feedback shaped Jani’s Acumatica development strategy, which stressed the blurring lines between industries and the need for a networked, real-time ERP solution that businesses can use in the future without changing systems.
Acumatica product teams visit dozens of customers per release to learn decision-making and processes. It uses AI and machine learning to improve customer productivity by providing more relevant and accurate data and automating activities.
Jani said Acumatica, a 15-year-old cloud-native platform, lets customers use new technologies and features in its “hassle-free connected cloud.” He noted the thousands of native integrations and how Acumatica is using AI in its solutions, giving instances of intelligent notifications, decision support, and copilot integrations throughout the platform and industry editions.
The vendor has produced Acumatica Principles of Innovation: Delivering Innovative Technology and Building Trust to explain its pragmatic approach to technology development. The principles commit Acumatica to responsibly, practically, and valuablely developing AI and other advances.
Acumatica’s 2024 R1 release will preview a fully redesigned user interface. With a.NET core, it will have greater screen readability, more user controls, and enhanced personalisation.
2024 R1 will add industry-specific features like:
- Construction: Real-time field reporting for connected construction communication
- Manufacturing: New operations reporting and kit planning capabilities
- Distribution: Better sales allocation management
- Retail: Shopify and Amazon improve sales management.
Final Thoughts
The Summit demonstrated the vendor’s dedication to innovating in the SMB market, with a capable offering for enterprises within certain sectors. Acumatica, like all technology vendors, has tremendous hurdles in prioritising activities and investments as technology advances rapidly. The vendor’s strong customer and community lens and focus on real-world problems should help it stay focused. Acumatica is well-positioned to continue its growth in the SMB ERP market by helping its customers navigate a tech-driven economy and thrive in a changing market landscape with industry-specific capabilities and usability and principled innovation.
