Acumatica Summit 2024, held in Las Vegas at the end of January, focused on Acumatica’s growth in technology, community, and strategy. CEO John Case opened the event, emphasizing the company’s commitment to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The Summit covered topics including customer expansion and community, partnerships, and introduced a Professional Services Edition, offering insights into Acumatica’s direction in the ERP market.
Keynote highlights
CEO John Case kicked off the Summit with a keynote that shared perspectives on Acumatica’s customer growth, new partnerships, and expansion into new countries.
Acumatica’s target market is SMBs with $5-$100M in revenue, and Case made it clear that the company will continue to focus on this market. A key theme was technology’s critical role in helping businesses overcome challenges and drive innovation. Case highlighted survey findings from SMB Group on the challenges and opportunities faced by SMBs, including labor shortages, supply chain issues, and the importance of technological adaptability in addressing these challenges.
According to Case, the private company has grown its customer base 25%+ year-over-year and has over 10,000 accounts. Acumatica has focused on building industry editions over the past few years, and today, nearly all of its new customers are buying these vertical solutions.
The company announced that it will continue on this track with the upcoming launch of its Professional Services Edition, which will be publicly available later in 2024. Built on Acumatica’s project accounting and billing, and scheduling capabilities, it will help these businesses manage the entire customer engagement lifecycle with one system.
Case noted that the company partner channel is also growing. Acumatica has been doing extensive partner mapping to align VAR expertise and coverage to cover its target industries and markets, and partners are now responsible for over half of its new deals.
Of course, no keynote is complete without AI. As with every other technology vendor on the planet, Acumatica sees it as a rich source of opportunity. The company has a couple of hundred AI projects underway and is already using generative AI to assist with development and support. Acumatica Chief Product Officer Ali Jani noted that many of these projects may not end up in the product if they do not practically and responsibly address customers’ real-world challenges.
Community engagement is another focal point for Acumatica. Aliya Rakimgulova, the company’s VP for Global Support, noted that ERP is more than software, and highlighted the Acumatica Community’s role in providing 24/7 monitoring, proactive support, and a secure, elastic infrastructure. The community’s growth to 22,000 members reflects Acumatica’s success in building a supportive ecosystem that offers resources such as user groups, webinars, and training sessions.
Shining a spotlight on customers
Executives shared insights into the company’s strategic direction and product innovations and brought customers into the spotlight to illustrate how SMBs are transforming their businesses with Acumatica solutions.
Chief Revenue Officer Sanket Akerkar elaborated on how Acumatica’s built-in scalability, growth-friendly licensing, and multinational capabilities can help SMBs, as evidenced by Telesis’ success story. Telesis, a company with five different business ventures ranging from data security to hydroponics, discussed that before adopting Acumatica, they were using Excel and point solutions to run the business. They became overwhelmed with double and triple data entry issues that stifled growth. The move to Acumatica’s integrated ERP has helped Telesis to grow its legacy businesses, and more easily launch its new hydroponics venture. With dashboards and side panels, they can now see how each business is doing, which helps them to make better decisions.
One of the things Telesis likes most about Acumatica is the licensing model. Unlike most SaaS vendors, who use a per-user pricing model, Acumatica’s model is based on three premises: the number of applications used, transaction volumes, and deployment method. Acumatica doesn’t limit the number of users, making it easy for its customers to add users as needed. 52% of Telesis employees use Acumatica, which has helped them get more value from the solution.
A couple of other notable stories included those from:
- Portacool, which shared the story of how it recovered following a devastating warehouse fire. The 33-year-old cooling systems company had moved from an “antiquated” ERP to Acumatica three years ago to gain the simplicity and visibility benefits it needed. Unfortunately, Portacool’s plant burned to the ground a year ago. It was able to build back because of strong support from its employees, friends, and partners, including Acumatica. Since Acumatica is a cloud solution, Portacool’s ERP system was untouched by the fire. Acumatica also stopped billing for 3 months to help Portacool successfully recover.
- POLYWOOD, which makes outdoor furniture from recycled plastics, showcased Acumatica’s role in enabling businesses to effectively scale and manage seasonal demand fluctuations. The company faces seasonal surges in demand for outdoor furniture and a growing customer demand for our brand, and needed a system to help them scale and grow, and said that Acumatica has been critical to helping them to achieve these goals.
Technology highlights
Ali Jani’s product presentation emphasized the company’s cloud-native foundation and the integration of AI and machine learning technologies to enhance decision-making and operational efficiency.
He discussed the future of Acumatica’s technology, including a new user interface, performance optimization, and the integration of AI and machine learning for enhanced decision support and automation. Jani’s roadmap for Acumatica’s development, heavily influenced by customer feedback, emphasized the blurring lines between industries and the importance of a connected, real-time ERP solution as a platform that businesses can take into the future without having to change systems.
Acumatica product teams make dozens of customer visits with every release to better understand decision-making and processes. Its goal is to use AI and machine learning to solve real-world problems by providing more relevant and accurate data and further automating workflows to help customers get things done faster.
Jani noted that Acumatica, created 15 years ago as a cloud-native platform, makes it easy for customers to take advantage of new technologies and features as they become available in its “hassle-free connected cloud.” He pointed to the dozens of native integrations available today, and how Acumatica is incorporating AI capabilities into its solutions, providing specific examples across the platform and industry editions for intelligent notifications, decision support, and copilot integrations.
The vendor has also published Acumatica Principles of Innovation: Delivering Innovative Technology and Building Trust) to communicate the pragmatic approach Acumatica takes to developing new technologies. The principles commit Acumatica to developing AI capabilities and other innovations in a responsible, practical, and valuable way
In its next release, 2024 R1, Acumatica will sport an initial preview of a completely revamped user interface. Based on a .NET core, it will feature better screen readability, a completely new set of user controls, and enhanced personalization capabilities.
2024 R1 will also include new industry-specific features, including:
- Construction: Real-time field reporting feature for connected communication for construction
- Manufacturing: New capabilities for reporting operations and planning kits
- Distribution: Enhancements for managing sales allocations
- Retail: More efficient sales management with Shopify and Amazon
Perspective
Acumatica Summit 2024 underscored Acumatica’s continuing commitment to use technology to deliver pragmatic innovation to its SMB customers.
In an era where technology advancements are accelerating at an unprecedented rate, Acumatica—like all technology vendors—also faces unprecedented challenges in prioritizing initiatives and investments. However, the vendor’s strong customer and community lens, and its emphasis on solving real-world problems should continue to help it to stay focused. With priorities including industry-specific capabilities and usability, and its promise to deliver principled innovation, Acumatica is well-positioned to continue its growth trajectory in the SMB ERP market, helping its customers navigate through an increasingly tech-driven economy and thrive in a changing market landscape.
© SMB Group 2024