Intacct Customer Spotlight: Superior Global Solutions

Today we take a look at one of the many companies that have outgrown QuickBooks® and graduated to Intacct’s cloud financial management and accounting software. Most small businesses start off using popular entry-level system like Intuit’s QuickBooks and then, as they grow, reach a point where they need a more robust and advanced financial management system.

Superior Global Solutions, a growing health information services company based in Plano, TX, is a perfect example. Superior Global recognized that as it grew, it developed more sophisticated financial management needs that QuickBooks was not set up to handle. In particular, they felt limited by the account structure, reporting, and data export capabilities of QuickBooks.

This led Superior Global to look for a new system. They knew they wanted a cloud-based system. They also wanted something that allowed for automation and the elimination of manual processes, plus a system that would reduce their reliance on spreadsheets.  Our cloud model, robust financial functionality, and clean and easy to use interface were all driving factors in Superior Global's decision to move to Intacct.

Todd Vick, President and CFO at Superior Global Solutions, noted:“We knew that a cloud system would provide improved access for our increasingly distributed workforce, and a system like Intacct would allow us to automate and enhance various manual processes to improve the productivity of our finance department.”

Superior Global went live on Intacct back in June of 2011, and the company has already realized several benefits including improved business visibility, reduced costs, and increased productivity. Here are some of the examples:

Enhanced Reporting… Intacct allows companies to track and report data using up to 13 dimensions and compare an unlimited number of actual, budget, and forecast scenarios – giving users incredible business insight. Vick commented: "The ability to track information along multiple dimensions in Intacct was very important.  With Intacct, we can easily capture, organize, and analyze both financial and operational data to manage the business more accurately and in much greater detail than ever before – which helps us make faster and better business decisions."

Improved Efficiency… Prior to Intacct, the finance team at Superior Global had to manually enter revenue information into QuickBooks. With Intacct, the order to cash process is automated, saving two to four days of work each month in manual data entry and increasing the confidence in the accuracy of invoicing details. Intacct has also enabled Superior Global to slice a full week off its financial close process. "One of the nice features we weren't even aware of going into our deployment was the ability to automate the calculation and entry of deferred revenue in Intacct,” added Vick. “This has gone from taking hours each month using a confusing spreadsheet, to a single entry with a solid audit trail for each item. This saves us time and money and enables us to better forecast this part of our business."

Going forward, Superior Global is looking to further integrate Intacct into their business processes. The company implemented Salesforce CRM just prior to adopting Intacct and they are now beginning to leverage our tight integration with Salesforce. They also plan to use our extensive multi-entity and multi-currency capabilities to process and consolidate transactions from their international operations.

The bottom line for Superior Global, according to Vick, "We've gained a powerful financial system that will scale with us as we continue to grow. From better financial visibility to improved processes, switching to Intacct has really paid off for us. Intacct will pay for itself within the first year we've been using it."

If you want to learn more about how Intacct helps companies that find themselves growing beyond the capabilities of QuickBooks, be sure to visit http://us.intacct.com/our-products/why-were-different/top-choice-quickbooks-graduates. I would also recommend attending one of our upcoming webinars to see Intacct in action: http://us.intacct.com/about-us/events.

Intacct’s Cloud Continues to Rise

As Dan Druker mentioned in his year-end blog post, 2011 was an amazing year of growth, innovation, and momentum for the Intacct community. From a business perspective, we added more than 1,000 new customers and more than 100 new partners. From a product perspective, we delivered more than 225 new features across the year, highlighted by the release of Intacct Fall 2011.

All of this great momentum was also reflected in yesterday’s announcement of our financial results. Intacct continues to grow at an impressive pace, with 128% year-over-year growth in net new bookings during 2011. Yes, you read that right – despite what some might consider a tough economic environment, Intacct more than doubled its new bookings last year. Intacct's cloud continues to rise at rate significantly faster than our rivals!

But it isn’t just about new customers. Our existing customers are adding new users and subscribing to additional applications in record numbers, and almost all of the company’s mid-market customers renewed their subscriptions during the year. Why is this important? It shows how satisfied Intacct customers are. So much so, that the company would be growing revenue faster than our on-premises software competitors just from customer add-ons and upgrades alone.

Channel 3.0: If You Build It, They Will Come…

One of the key growth drivers for the company is our channel program. While value added resellers (VARs) are not new, especially to the financial management and accounting software market, there aren’t many cloud computing vendors that have achieved success in this area.

That’s changing and 2011 was certainly the year of the channel for Intacct. Our Channel Chief, Taylor Macdonald, and his team have put together an impressive program that is turning the cloud financials space on its head. Their strategy, which they dub “Channel 3.0,” focuses on building a program centered on quality, not quantity. This is certainly reflected in the level of partners that have joined the program – 19 of the top 100 CPA firms, 17 of the Top 100 VARs in the industry, 18 “VAR Stars,” and eight firms on Accounting Today’s list of Technology Pacesetters.

The high quality of our partners and the ability to get up and selling quickly with Intacct’s cloud financial applications led to a breakout quarter for the channel over the last three months of 2011. Intacct’s channel partners delivered a six-fold increase in new bookings over the same period in 2010. In fact, Intacct’s business partners (VARs) closed nearly as many new customers during the last quarter as in the previous four quarters combined.

These partners are also driving the creation of new, complementary applications that extend Intacct into new areas. Built using Intacct’s cloud-based application development tools, these native applications run in our world-class data centers and are completely integrated with the Intacct system. This drives new revenue opportunities for partners and delivers added value to Intacct customers. We’ve even launched a new way for customers to find and research these applications in the new Intacct Marketplace.

Now is certainly a great time to be part of the Intacct community!

2011 - What a great year for the Intacct family

This is the time of year to reflect on the past year and look forward into what's coming in 2012.

2011 was an amazing year of growth, innovation and momentum for the Intacct community.

The highlights from a business perspective:

• More than 1,000 new customers signed up with Intacct and our partners
• We also signed more than 100 new business partners
• Our total customer count surpassed 5,000, with more than 30,000 individual business entities on the system
• We had nearly perfect customer retention and very high customer satisfaction
• We also had nearly perfect system up-time across all of 2011
• We saw that nice matters: A web sentiment survey showed that people like Intacct a lot more than our top competitor NetSuite. Which really does matter in the ERP world. 
• Our user and partner conference in Las Vegas was a huge hit - with just about double the attendance of the prior year.
• We grew out of our old headquarters and moved up to a great new, much larger location. 

We also made a ton of progress on the product and partner front:

• We delivered more than 225 new features across the year, highlighted by the release of Intacct Fall 2011.  
• A large number of the features we delivered were crowdsourced - based on ideas submitted by and voted on by our customers and partners - pretty cool for an ERP system
• Our most recent addition to our multi-everything financial platform - adding native multi-dimensional support to our existing multi-ledger, multi-book, multi-currency, multi-language, and multi-scenario capabilities, enjoyed the fasted and broadest adoption of any new feature set in our history.
• There are now more than 80 third party applications available that extend the value of Intacct, including more than 30 that were built by our partners with Intacct's amazing new web-based development tools.
• We made huge improvements to our project accounting applications and signed an exciting new partnership with Clarizen to resell their fantastic project management applications.
• We are feeling great about the enhancements that Intacct and our partners have made to the system to support not for profit organizations - from fund accounting to allocations management.
• We greatly enhanced our already world class capabilities around revenue management and revenue recognition.
• We inked a major partnership with Paychex to deliver Payroll and HR to our customers.
• Our clients and partners love our new "consumerized" user interface and are using Intacct on mobile devices like the iPad in numbers.
• We made significant investments making our products even more productive for CPA firms, and our partnership with the AICPA and CPA2Biz continues to go extremely well.

So what's in store for 2012? 
From a business perspective, 2012 will be about even more accelerated growth for Intacct and our partners on the back of unstoppable cloud computing momentum. As we grow the business, we are significantly growing the company and putting continued and heavy investment into customer satisfaction and innovation.

You can look forward to new partnerships that introduce Intacct to new markets, and that extend the value of the Intacct system. I'm expecting an explosion of cool new applications that our partners will build using our cloud-based development tools.  I couldn't be more excited about the amazing channel partners we have teamed with - they are going to deliver massive value to the Intacct community.

From a product perspective, it's all about productivity and innovation - Making Intacct even easier to use and more productive for our customers and partners. Listening to what our clients and partners are asking for and encouraging them to vote on our product roadmap.  Delivering innovation based on the cloud delivery model.

2011 was awesome but 2012 looks to be even better.  Happy new year everyone from your friends at Intacct.

Best wishes to all,

- Dan

Cloud economics and the channel

At the Information Technology Alliance meeting in Austin last week it was clear that the mid-market value added reseller community is feeling that cloud computing momentum is now unstoppable, but many are still struggling to get their heads around the economic model behind cloud computing and how it is different from what they are used to in the old licensed software model.


The background behind this discussion is that the sales of new licenses have dramatically slowed down for the traditional mid-market ERP software companies – driven by the aging of their products, by the recession and now by the huge growth of cloud computing. This has put revenue and earnings pressure on the publishers of legacy software applications, which has caused them to reduce R&D investment, consolidate product lines and to squeeze the margins of their channel partners.

There are a couple of key insights that have made the light bulbs go off in my head around this topic that I thought I would share.

In the old on-premises software license model, the software vendor has high margins on a high dollar amount for the initial sale of their software, and very high margins on a much smaller dollar amount for recurring software maintenance fees. So the vendor’s cash in might look like $50,000 in year one and $9,000 ongoing. The vendor’s expenses might be $25,000 in year one and $2k per year recurring.


In the cloud computing / Software as a Service model, the vendor typically has zero or negative margins on a smaller dollar amount on the initial sale, and good margins on an ongoing recurring subscription fee that is 100% of the initial fee. So cash in looks like $30,000 both in the first year and ongoing and expenses might be $30,000 in the first year and $10,000 per year ongoing.

I think most people can wrap their heads around this. But this is also about the point in the discussion with the channel partner where I usually get the question – “Why would my client ever be willing to pay the same amount every year for their software when today they only pay 18 to 24% of their initial purchase price in ongoing years."


So here is the first key insight - in the old on-premises model, the vendor and channel partner economics are limited to the application software only.

In the SaaS or cloud computing model, the vendor and channel partner also participate in the revenue stream that their customers would formerly have spent on hardware, operating systems, databases, operations and IT, etc. All of these infrastructure and operating component are built into multi-tenant cloud applications – but the channel partner never considered this holistic view before because they only participated in the application software license component. From the channel partners economic model perspective, it means that in the SaaS model the channel partner is getting an ongoing revenue share on a much bigger slice of a much bigger pie.

And here is what’s really cool - In the SaaS model the customer actually pays less every year when you consider the total cost of ownership of the all in costs to operate the entire system. This is the secret sauce behind SaaS economics – it’s the disintermediation of IT infrastructure and operations – with the savings being split between the customer (who’s TCO is less per year) and higher ongoing margins to the publisher and the channel partner. The losers are the hardware and infrastructure software companies plus no value added IT tasks.

The key to SaaS margins is that the firms in the cloud computing world are vastly more efficient in infrastructure and operations that any individual customer can ever hope to be on their own – in the case of Intacct we and our channel partners gain a share of the spend that more than 5,000 CFOs would formerly have had to make on servers, copies of Oracle, IT staff, backup services, disaster recovery, etc.

If a channel partner is selling traditional ERP software, the channel partner typically participates only in the application software piece of the pie – the CFO writes separate checks to Dell, to Oracle, to their own internal IT staff, etc that the channel partner will never see or participate in.

This seems to be the hardest thing for the traditional channel to understand – they are so used to just thinking about only getting a piece of the application license fees. The cool thing about SaaS is it’s better for everyone (well everyone except the infrastructure vendors) – customers get better service and a lower total cost and the channel participates in a bigger slice of the overall pie.

This inevitably leads to the question of – ok what happens in the future when cloud computing matures – will the cloud firms squeeze channel margins like the on-premises publishers are doing today?

Here is the dynamic.

When new business dries up or slows down the legacy software vendor is in trouble because they only have the maintenance stream of their application software to rely on, and as we discussed above the dollar amounts are very small in comparison to new license sales – so small the high margins can’t make up for the overall earnings and revenue hit to the publisher. So what do they have to do – they squeeze expenses, including marketing, development and the channel.

When new business slows for a SaaS vendor, there is much less of a disruption – because the marginal impact of new sales is much lower and the ongoing stream is dominant both in terms of revenue and margin. Fast growing SaaS vendors actually get more profitable when new business slows down – the opposite of license vendors – because their mix shifts from zero or negative margin new business to solid margin stream business. So there isn’t the same pressure on SaaS companies to squeeze marketing or development or channel margins as business slows.

For fake cloud vendors – that are peddling “cloud washed” hosted versions of their old on-premises software it’s even worse – because their products are not multi-tenant, they don’t have anything close to the ongoing operating margins that the modern multi-tenant cloud vendors do – it is literally an order of magnitude more expensive to run hosted or single-tenant software that it is to run multi-tenant cloud applications.

This is why fake cloud vendors typically start out with unattractive channel margins from the get-go – they can’t afford to pay the channel due to technology economics - or inevitably will squeeze or disintermediate their channel - the hosted model is just broken economically.  Witness the failure of the application service provider market in the early 2000’s – the fake cloud / hosted market is similarly doomed because the economics are not viable as compared with multi-tenant SaaS.

The last idea I'll leave you with is how positive the impact of  both the business and innovation model of SaaS is to the channel partner and their client.  It is not at all uncommon in the old on-premises world for channel partners to have just 10 or 20% of their customers on maintenance and support - which means most of the work they get is non-strategic and non-value added break-fix tasks and they engage with these clients very infrequently. In the SaaS world 100% of customers are on support and maintenance - it's embedded in the subscription fee and the overall delivery model and there is no way for the client to opt out - and new features come out monthly or quarterly - so the value added reseller becomes inseparable from the ongoing business processes of the client in helping them absorb change and take advantage of new functionality.  Again this model works out way better for both the VAR and their client - the client gets continuous innovation and saves money, the VAR gets a constant stream of both value added work and ongoing revenue.

I hope this post helps to sort out some of the economic thinking behind why multi-tenant cloud computing is a win win win – better for the client, better for the channel partner and better for publisher too.

Moving up Slope with Intacct

While attending the Intacct Advantage conference earlier this month in Las Vegas, I became obsessed with a slide from Gartner that one of the Intacct executives referenced. The columns were alliterative, irreverent, and yet somehow acutely accurate about not just cloud computing but most of the technology shifts I've seen in the last 28 years with ERP software.

Intacct's timing of having 5,000 customers after 11 years in business, and a fairly mature product, gives them a leg up and allows them to fall in the "Slope of Enlightenment" category.

The chart itself is not as irreverent as the book Kick Your Own Ass: The Will, Skill, and Drill of Selling which was the work of the keynote speaker, Rob Johnson (who was excellent). Still, there are good thoughts to be brought out of this chart by Gartner.

My first thought was this graph almost looks like a bell curve, but the last part of the curve is critical because it goes up again. My second thought was that I can't remember a technology that has been hyped this much in a long time at least in the ERP space. Moving from DOS to Windows or from Pervasive SQL to SQL Server did not get this type of attention. The third thought I had was, other than pure entertainment value (which matters) can there really be a "Trough of Disillusionment" that hits this low with ERP in the cloud?

The main concerns with cloud computing in the ERP space seem to be security and integration. Having gone through the consultant training for new representatives, I can assure you that security is not an issue with this product. It's tight. If the majority of your integrating is with legacy products, I could see you having a concern with integration however the XML-based Web Services that Intacct offers largely helps dismiss this concern.

One of my other thoughts was that 5,000 customers, some of which have lots of data, could make a program like this very slow. That's not the case. In fact I was delighted with the performance when I went through the training and when I run reports or do anything within Intacct. Most of the users that I spoke to at the conference mentioned how much better their software performed when compared to a well known on-premise solution that wasn't even running in a terminal server or hosted type of environment.



So with the up tick in personal cloud users pointed out by the next graph below, the tide seems to continue rising for Intacct. Since Intacct is a best-of-breed developer, partnering with other strong products such as Avalara (salestax), Clarizen (project management), and SFDC (CRM), it is clear to me that Intacct will help continuing to push not only the cloud into higher skies but also the number of products that can seamlessly integrate with users that can benefit from this real and deep integration. The integration with Salesforce for example is one of the highest rated integrations of the many programs out on AppExchange.



One final quote that helps me feel more certain about Intacct's continued success comes from ERP Analyst Ben Kepes:

"Intacct occupied a relatively unique space. At the top end of town there are a number of players jostling for position – NetSuite, SAP and others. At the lower end of town there are a plethora of SMB accounting products – both for the incumbents like Sage, MYOB and Intuit, and also the new entrants – Xero, FreeAgent, IAC-EZ. In the middle space however there is a distinct lack of solutions that are suitable for the 'bigger than small, but smaller than big set.' Intacct fits this space nicely and the opportunity for them is massive."

Really ? I can expense an iPad !

Really ? You mean I can expense an iPad now !  Awesome !

That was probably my favorite reaction from Intacct's customers and partners last week at Intacct Advantage 2011.

I was blown away by the excitement that we saw about the convergence of mobile devices, tablets and cloud computing from the CFO's, controllers and CPA's who attended the conference.

The industry analysts talk about this same idea in the context of the consumerization of information technology.  As in people now having the expectations that the smart phones and tablets they love in their lives as consumers should also work for their business applications.

What I saw at the conference was all about desire. The people that already have and love these devices really want to use them for their business applications too. And the people that don't have one yet want one.

My favorite reaction was from finance execs who haven't yet made the plunge - You mean I can expense an iPad now - Awesome !

I haven't seen that much excitement about financial and accounting applications in a long time.

It was really fun.

Cloud washing in Action - Sage ERP MAS 90 Online

Forrester Research has created a term they call "Cloud washing" - which they define as software vendors taking old products and dressing them up in modern new cloud computing clothes.  ZDNet's Larry Dignan says "Cloud washing refers to the practice of slapping the term “cloud” on any old technology you have."

I came across one of the more egregious examples of cloud washing today - in a story on CRN about the launch of new cloud and SaaS versions of Sage MAS 90 and MAS 200 - 1980's era software that's about as non-modern and non-cloud as anything you can imagine.

The story quotes Erik Kaas, VP of product management at Sage, who starts out using adjectives that I would agree with like "online" and "vendor-hosted" when talking about the new MAS 90 and MAS 200 offerings.  But then he goes on to refer to the same products as a Software as a Service, multi-tenant and cloud computing. (Links are to Wikipedia definitions) And that's cloud washing in action.

Update as of November 5 - Sage has apparently contacted CRN and retracted some of their original claims about multi-tenancy and SaaS.  The story no longer uses these words.

What Erik doesn't exactly say is what Sage is actually offering -  a copy of regular old MAS 90 or MAS 200, running in a third party data center and bundled with Citrix so you can access it over the Web, and with monthly subscription pricing. It's 1985 stuff in fancy new cloud clothes.

Some history.  MAS 90 was built back in the mid 1980's by a really great, innovative company called State of the Art Software. The product name MAS 90 actually stands for Master Accounting Series of the 90's. That's back when "of the 90's was cool and futuristic. MAS 90 is a mature and capable product - it's also just really old and it sure isn't modern, cloud or SaaS.

MAS 90 today retains its 1980's architecture file-server based system.  MAS 200 SQL is the same product with the 1990 innovation of running on a client-server relational database.  Both products are fat-client windows products with Windows XP look and feel, neither supports native web-access, and both are single-tenant. Not SaaS, not cloud, not web-native and not multi-tenant.

The Sage partner forum on LinkedIn picked up this blog post and is currently debating in their community of more than 5,000 people. Their main complaints about this post are that they don't like the tone of my writing, (If I sound mean it's unintentional by the way) and some of the folks over there are taking the position that hosted software has the same benefits as modern native cloud applications. One of the posters says "Citrix has become a pretty good technology, you can run its client almost anywhere including things like iPads" - but this just reinforces my point about cloudwashing - if you did open up MAS 90 online within Citrix on your iPad, what you would get is a 1990's Windows XP user interface on your 2011 iPad - and it would be unusable since you don't have a mouse or keyboard. Think about how disappointing this kind of cloudwashing would be for the actual customer who believed the claim that now you can run MAS 90 on your iPad. 

So let's be clear.  The proper term of art for this delivery model is either ASP or Hosted - perhaps you could stretch into on-line. Calling it SaaS and Cloud misrepresent what Sage are really offering and just confuses the market. And it will provide customers just a fraction of the benefits of modern, multi-tenant cloud-native systems.

Let the buyer beware.

Fantastic Numbers from Intacct Advantage Conference

Sure numbers can lie but I trust them more than "facts" without something to quantify a statement. I was impressed with the numbers coming out of Intacct at their annual conference in Las Vegas this week. Here are some of those numbers:

• 106% Year over Year growth
• Added 100 new partners and 1000 new customers
• 40% more people work at Intacct this year than last year
• 3 to 10 times faster growth than the average ERP vendor
• Partner revenue went from 5% to 36% in one year

As a partner, the number above I like the most is the push toward a channel. It's not easy to get to 5,000 active customers in the ERP space and Intacct got there mainly through their direct salesforce-until now. They clearly understand the growth and profitability limits that selling direct imposes on a developer. Their push toward a channel appears to be both selective and collaborative-omitting from their channel those partners that do not play well with other representatives of the product. In the early days of working for Solomon Software, we created this type of environment and it was very nice to be able to collaborate with friendly competitors, not take each other's clients, and refer business to each other when another partner was a better fit in an industry that we could not perform well in.

The thing that struck me at the conference, which was both exciting and scary, was how little ongoing help the existing clients of Intacct need. Even smaller non-profits which often can have less sophisticated staffs seemed to need little help implementing complex programs such as multi-currency and multi-company. Of course they needed help getting the software configured, they needed training, some data imported and perhaps some help here and there with a tough report. However many of the users I spoke with rarely call for support or are looking or needing to extend the software beyond their own abilities.

I'm all for satisfied clients being self-reliant-don't get me wrong. The clients that are self-reliant typically make the best references. It's just that we have 10 people to keep busy and it appears one of the main ways to do this almost has to be to sell a lot of new clients. It does seem that once we get a few clients, this will not be so difficult. Each time I've gone to a vendor's main tradeshow (Convergence by Microsoft mainly), the clients that tend to pony up and pay the money to attend, tend to be the happier clients. Why would you invest the time and money to attend a software conference unless you really thought the vendor was pretty good and might have some valuable things to teach you?

All in all, I would say that the partner day was extremely valuable. It is nice to learn what people are doing to be successful in marketing, selling, and implementing. One particular session, monitored and managed by Peyton Burch, was especially useful. It was a panel of successful VARS that had closed deals and had a wonderful variety in the way that they were finding and closing deals. Peyton managed to keep the questions toward the end until the panel got to share with the audience what the audience wanted to hear. Still, the audience got to ask their questions and offer their opinions for a nicely planned 50 minutes.

The customer part of the conference offered a lot of variety. The sessions I attended for non-profits and revenue recognition, I felt at the time, needed Intacct experts assisting more. In fairness to Intacct, the sessions I selected, due to my interest in those topics, happened to be panels. There were five tracks - 53 sessions - of which 43 were taught by Intacct experts or were hands on training. One of the five tracks was devoted to customers teaching other customers about Intacct - certainly a reasonable ratio. People often want to hear from others like them not just the publisher.

Of the ISV's presenting software, the Clarizen demonstration done for me by Guy Shani, was the best. The timecard, expense entry, and resource scheduling (the element I was most interested in) looked easy and fluid. The integration with Outlook made the maintenance (my concern) work minimized as long as people update their Outlook calendars.

The presentation of the platform tools was impressive. It was nice to see how much a non-technical person could do in extending the functionality and outside integration without any type of programming background.

Another bright spot for me of this conference was the presentation and private conversation I had with Dan Miller, VP Product Management. Talk about a guy that "gets it" that users want "easy" before everything else-this in your man. The simple idea of presenting ideas on their portal and having users vote on them is so straight-forward it is a wonder that other ERP vendors don't do this. As a person whose firm represents this product, do I have strong feelings about what improvements I would like in the product?-of course. Does it make more sense to get the opinions of the people that actually are paying for the software and using it everyday?-well yes! The improvements to the user interface, to me, were tremendous. I was actually quite surprised to learn from Dan how many of the existing users preferred the older menuing system. The updated screens I would assume will get little objection as they look newer and make it much more obvious how to do certain things such as delete a line.

One of the highlights of the event for me was how positively giddy one of the VC's I met were about their investment in Intacct. This firm, Intacct Software, is clearly making money. You can't hide that much delight-and he didn't. He clearly believes a lucrative IPO will be coming shortly for him and his partners.

Nice conference and nice year Intacct.

Armanino CFO Summit

A few weeks ago, I attended a Growth Summit for Technology CFOs put on by Armanino McKenna in Palo Alto, and I gained some interesting insights from leading technology CFOs. One of my favorite panel questions of the day was, "What is the single most important skill for a CFO to develop in the next five years?" The panelists advised:

• Leading the business, not just keeping track of it
• Being nice to your lawyers (a lawyer said this, of course)
• Developing your network, because hiring the best team-internal and external-is the single biggest favor you can do for your career
• Continuing to learn new things, particularly IT-related, because technology is an increasingly critical enabler

There was a lot of talk about the growth of cloud computing at the event, and a full house for a breakout session discussing the cloud from the CFO's perspective. The keynote speaker Bruce Felt, CFO of Success Factors, leads a $300 million cloud computing company-something that probably didn't exist (outside Salesforce) 3 or 4 years ago! Bruce set the stage for the cloud discussion by confessing that he uses SaaS for every single business application except for one, which is probably on its way out as well. He prefers being the buyer of technology, and he also believes cloud applications enable the business to grow faster and be less reliant on technologists in order to run smoothly.

• During the cloud computing panel, moderator Tom Mescall, Partner-in-Charge of Armanino McKenna's consulting department shared that most CFOs think they should at least evaluate a SaaS option in every procurement process. But on-premises vendors frequently "muddy the waters" by saying they have a cloud solution-which is typically just the same old on-premises solution in a hosted environment. The panelists agreed that most of the true SaaS applications are actually newer and based on better technology. One of the highlights from this panel was the CFOs revealing what they love most about their cloud applications. Now they can: Avoid having to rely on IT.
• Access information easily-anywhere, at any time over the web-so they can work with great talent wherever they're located.
• Afford professional-strength business applications for their growing start ups-without hardware or IT investments.
• Scale with systems rather than hiring, creating huge savings.
• Take advantage of the system infrastructure and security provided by SaaS vendors that they couldn't otherwise afford.
• Implement better, more robust processes that most small companies couldn't afford.
• Simplify data sharing with 3rd parties-less paper pushing.
• Manage a single source of data-no more reconciling spreadsheets!

The audience asked for advice on the challenges they face: how to get buy-in to move from on-premises applications to cloud, and how to get people to give up their spreadsheets. The panel recommended using ROI analysis, piloting where possible, and starting with a small investment and expanding from there. On the Excel conundrum, their advice was to look at where people are using spreadsheets, because that's the quickest way to find breakdowns in your processes.

My favorite "food for thought" from the day was Bruce Felt's answer to the question of how he became a CFO who's a strategic leader for his company: "What do you have to lose? Competitive forces will kill you before compliance forces do." Good point.

The Intacct Advantage in Professional Services and Software Firms

Professional Services and Software companies have different problems than the rest of us. Without even getting into VSOE (Vendor Specific Objective Evidence), firms that have a lot of their sales work such as client, price list and contract maintenance done in a CRM system such as Salesforce, often have the issue of having to rekey those client addresses, contract details, and sales order specifics into two separate products. They also have to maintain price lists in both areas-which is difficult and introduces data integrity issues. People sometimes don't key the same piece of data into two systems identically-especially if the people are two different people.

Many accounting products offer web services now. It's not just SaaS products. What Intacct does that is unique is that they ensured that the integration was done and worked well between their solution and one of the leading CRM providers-Saleforce. This means that not only can you check off your list that these products can integrate (where you or your consultant has to create the integration), this means that they already do integrate in the most common areas where a professional services or software organization would want them to.

The first slide shows how most professional service and software firms manage their businesses. They have a CRM system and an accounting system. You could think of this as the "Before Intacct" model. Please note that price lists, contacts, and customer master information is maintained in two different places.

This second slide, or "After Intacct" slide shows that key items such as Price List and Customer Master (includes contacts) are sharing this data in real time through real time integration between the two products.

If you work for a Professional Services organization and you are not even to the point in the first screen capture-meaning you may still be doing your quotes in Excel-this solution is even better. And if you work for a software firm that sells software, maintenance and services bundled together where you have revenue recognition challenges, Intacct is a product you should seriously consider. This product has both the horizontal capabilities of a solid mainstream product that has been endorsed by the AICPA but also the vertical features you probably need if you are in the software business. This is true even if you only sell software and have the revenue issues. If you have a staff of consultants rather than a challenge-Intacct becomes even more valuable to you with its cloud access from most computers and most devices.

So consider the value of a software product that does the following things for you:

• Process automation to increase your profitability
• Real time, consistent information in the cloud
• Don’t need IT to manage finance infrastructure
• Superior multi-entity, multi-currency, and financial consolidation for improved visibility
• Business visibility & control

As a professional services firm that uses a product we like very much, we have made the move to Intacct. Why? 225 maintenance plans to track, a remote workforce that does not enjoy slow terminal service or VPN connections for their timecards and expense reports are the main reasons. We also don’t want to have to keep upgrading our own hardware, our database versions, our server operating systems, our client operating systems, or our own customizations each time we upgrade a version of what we use. Why disrupt your business when you can keep working productively? Why keep buying hardware when the rest of the world is ridding itself of that IT burden?

Silverlight debacle coming to the cloud applications world?

Just read an interesting article on the Microsoft Dynamics Community website - Microsoft Dynamics GP 12's Silverlight Plans Unchanged Despite Windows 8 Plug-In Limitations - which connects the dots in a way that had not been on my radar yet.

I knew that SAP had chosen Microsoft Silverlight as the technology for building out the user interface for Business by Design. 

I also knew Microsoft was using Silverlight as the way to start to "cloudify" it's Dynamics product lines. As recently as April of this year, the Dynamics team Microsoft was telling people Silverlight is our Key for Cloud Credibility. 

But here's the problem - in the consumer world of 2011, Apple, Google, Facebook and now even Microsoft have decided that Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight aren't cool anymore - and a newer technology called HTML 5 is the answer for rich web applications.  

Late last year we started seeing the Microsoft operating system and web browser teams start to move away from Silverlight and to embrace HTML 5 - see stories  here, here, and here.

As Microsoft have begun to further disclose their plans for Windows 8, the volume got even louder.The thread discussing this on the Windows 8 web forum got close to 200 posts from Silverlight developers freaking out before it was locked - and it now has more than 7 million views.

The most current Microsoft position appears to be that Silverlight will not work in Internet Explorer 10 or the new user interface of Windows 8 - and forget tablet/mobile usage, since neither Apple or Google have Silverlight plug-ins on their tablets or smart phones.

Which leaves the users of these applications in an interesting bind, as noted in the original article - don't upgrade to Windows 8 or IE 10 and you'll be just fine. No wonder the development community is freaking out. According to ZDNet - It definitely seems Microsoft’s ultimate goal is to wean developers off Silverlight and to convince them to use HTML5 and JavaScript to write new apps for Windows, going forward.

This really highlights the risks of using proprietary technologies when building cloud applications. While it may not be a big deal for some consumer website to shift their on-line video player from Silverlight to HTML 5 - from an enterprise application developer point of view it means a complete re-write of a large part of your applications.

The lesson - when building cloud apps take great care to use only open web standards - and when evaluating cloud apps make sure the vendor isn't using any proprietary technologies like Silverlight that will lock you into or out of any particular platform - the whole point of cloud computing is to free you to work from anywhere, anytime and on any device you choose.

I bet we will all be hearing more about this soon - its certainly sounds like a budding debacle to me. There is also considerable irony that the Microsoft Dynamics GP team bet on a technology that appears to be being abandoned by the Microsoft Windows and Browser teams - but that's just piling on...

Intacct Revenue Management and Vertical Offerings

One of the many challenges in offering non-industry specific accounting software products is running into competitors that sell only into that vertical.

5 years ago while selling Dynamics SL, which has unbelievable project accounting features, to an engineering firm-this happened to us. We had committed a lot of our billable resources to the presentation and the firm, which was quite large, but they were not forthcoming in telling us what was important to them. They wanted to both add drama and see how well we could think on our feet.

Almost half way through the day, the client shared that they would like us to show "whatever we have" in the way of a soil testing module. Horizontal packages don't have soil testing modules but the industry specific product had one.

So you can imagine my enthusiasm for a horizontal package such as Intacct that has vertical features in the professional services market and the software development markets we market into.

Intacct offers a zero client software, no terminal services, no infrasture needed, fast ability for firms to enter timecards and approve them from anywhere-that will run from multiple browsers.
So what does this have to do with your revenue recognition problems?

It also offers the ability to unbundle software sales into recognizable revenue streams using the rules that VSOE (Vendor Specific Objective Evidence) makes necessary to conform with U.S. GAAP.

For those of you that are not familiar with VSOE and revenue recognition rules, here is what is up.
Twelve years ago, a growing clamor started because software companies, trying to beautify themselves by recognizing revenue ahead of delivery, led the AICPA to clamp down.

These VSOE rules say that when software and other items are bundled together in a contract, a company cannot recognize any of the revenue from the contract until the last item has been delivered — unless it can prove the separate value of each item.

In other words, if a company sells a software license with installation services and 12 months of maintenance, it must either defer all that revenue for 12 months or recognize it proportionately over the 12 months, depending on the particular circumstances, unless it can establish the independent values of the undelivered items.

In practice, without an accounting software product such as Intacct, these rules constrain the ways companies sell their products, chew up a lot of management time, and put off investors.

Intacct Revenue Management helps organizations adapt and comply with evolving revenue recognition guidelines. The software increases productivity by automating the revenue recognition, billing and renewal processes. It also helps CFO's, gain real time visibility into future, deferred and renewal revenue streams.

So we are excited to get behind Intacct, our newest product offering, as we would like to someday give a presentation and the prospective client say "ok consultants, show us your VSOE modules."

The IRS wants your data file - That's so 1980's....

Here's another unexpected benefit of cloud computing - preventing the IRS from snooping through your financial data.

The IRS has just issued guidelines for it's examiners to request copies of your accounting software data files.  They are thinking about QuickBooks, Peachtree, and other accounting software data files  - and they've installed software in their offices to access your financial information.

While having a 1980's era file-based system for sharing data files has long been a work-around for businesses to send their financial information to a trusted business partner like a CPA firm, the IRS has now clearly taken notice and wants in. 

The FAQ about this program on the IRS website is quite instructive - they want your data file, and the expect you to send it to them.  

"The IRS has instituted a program to request accounting software files when examining certain small business taxpayers, and SB/SE examiners can now accept and read data files from accounting software packages used by most small businesses"

The problem is that if you send the IRS your entire data file, this allows them to snoop far beyond the issue they are investigating - because these products store all of your data in a single file - your financial data, your customer data, your supplier data, your product data - and a single file includes data that spans many years - making it very easy and attractive for the IRS to go on a fishing expedition. The net: the very same single data file that made it easy to send your information to your CPA now exposes you to needless risk with the IRS.

We at Intacct were pleased to be invited to a meeting with the AICPA and the IRS in Washington DC last week to discuss this issue and how to protect taxpayers. And here's the cool thing about cloud computing - at least for modern multi-tenant cloud applications like Intacct - there simply is no file for IRS to request - we don't even have the concept of a file underlying the system. 

Instead the whole system is based on real-time collaboration over the web, with access control and security built in. With Intacct you've got two good options if the IRS wants your data - you can easily export a subset of your information that precisely matches their request and submit it to the IRS in whatever format you wish.  Or you can give the IRS examiner a login to your Intacct system, since you have complete control over what they can and cannot see and you can limit them precisely to the information they have requested.  In both cases, you can cost-effectively remain compliant while ensuring that you don't accidentally over-disclose information.

It's so interesting to see an unexpected downside of a 1980's vintage technology - the data file - cropping up in 2011. We've grown beyond our Betamaxes and our Bon Jovi cassettes - maybe with cloud computing we can also move on from data files.

A brand-new data center for 5,000 companies - and no one noticed...

The benefits of cloud computing from an IT operations perspective are relatively well documented - the idea being that everything to do with running the software becomes the vendor's problem - but this weekend we had an extreme example of the beauty of cloud computing at Intacct that is I think informative.

At Intacct, we've been growing so fast that we were about to run out of power and space at our primary data center, which runs at an IBM facility. Our operations team has also not been entirely thrilled with some of the service and support we've been receiving from IBM, so we've known for a while it was time to upgrade.

After a thorough evaluation, we selected Savvis, and their tier one facility in San Jose, California. Savvis is also running applications for cloud computing leaders including salesforce.com, Adobe, SAP, amazon.com, and Workday, as well as for corporate giants like GE, Coca Cola, Thomson Reuters, Microsoft, P&G and eBay - so Intacct and our clients are in good company.  After the transition, our major data centers are with Savvis in California and with Sungard in Pennsylvania - and we have plenty of headroom matching our greater than 100% annual growth.

This weekend, we upgraded 5,000 customers to our brand new facility at Savvis. Our operations team have been preparing and practicing for the upgrade for nearly a year, we purchased and installed all new and upgraded hardware and we notified all of our users and partners of the pending upgrade well in advance.

The actual switchover took place over a three hour window last Friday night, plus a one hour window on Saturday night. That's it - just a few hours of scheduled downtime and everyone was back up and running, just better and faster than before.

And here's the best part - We had one support call this morning related to the transition - that's it, across more than 5,000 companies, more than 30,000 business entities and tens of thousands of users that were upgraded. When people came into work this Monday morning, all that our clients noticed is faster performance than they saw last Friday - everything else is entirely transparent to them. 

I can't think of a better statement about the IT value of cloud computing - 5,000 customers automatically upgraded to a new and better facility, with all new and much faster servers, state of the art hardware and upgraded network connectivity - and all totally transparent and at no incremental cost or effort to any customer. 

Can you imagine in the old world of on-premises software what would have happened if 5,000 companies all swapped out their data centers (or even just replaced their hardware) for their ERP system themselves - the time and expense, the number of upgrades that would have failed, the amount of downtime that would have been incurred?

I hope you agree this is a great example of why cloud computing is just that much better.

Intacct Chosen by Indiana-based Software Developer

As a representative of a few accounting software programs and "student of the game", I always get excited to speak to someone I hardly know about how and why they bought their new accounting software program.

Usually this type of situation lends itself to complete honesty and often enjoyment on both sides regarding understanding what made a person pick one product over another. When I am the person offering the product and get "turned down"-I'm always concerned that the person didn't want to give me all the reasons someone else won the deal.

Intacct Software sells directly and through a channel. A CFO who lives and whose business (roughly 10 million in sales) is in Indiana follows my blog and called me when he got into the market for software.

He started to speak to me about Intacct at a time that was before we represented the product and he was already working with someone directly at Intacct.

I shared with him that I wanted to implement the software in Minneapolis first and really just wanted to understand his process and reasons for whatever he selected. It was not my goal to have our first client in a different time zone and a plane ride away.

The two products he looked at mainly were Netsuite and Intacct. I told him that he should look at Acumatica as well.

Incidentally, I asked him if I could use his name in my blog and he said "no" because he gets enough calls from solicitors and likes to keep his anonymity as much as possible. More importantly, he also shared that I can call him in November of this year (2011) to see how everything went.

He found Intacct to have the best Financial Statement generator with eliminating entries of the three he reviewed. His firm is a SaaS-based software developer and they offer subscriptions all over the world, so the Multi-National reporting was important to him.

Netsuite could not provide the type of Multi-National reporting needed. He liked Acumatica's financial reporting but thought the product looked and felt too much like a distribution product and he wanted something more tailored to a software developer. He said that Netsuite's One World was good with the Multi-National reporting-but not as good and certainly weaker in many other areas.

He also shared that he had heard some bad things about Netsuite's customer retention and decided to Google "Netsuite Sucks". He found the number of responses alone made him eliminate Netsuite despite the fact that their salesperson was very good. He referenced this site that said 38% of people using Netsuite really don't like it.

I looked at the sites http://amplicate.com/hate/netsuite, and also http://www.clientsfirst-us.com/blog/partners-perspective/industry-insights/customers-are-running-away-from-netsuite/ and some of the comments, to be fair, were not negative about the software but negative about the overall experience.

He also shared that Netsuite could not handle the VSOE (Vendor Specific Objective Evidence) requirement as well as Intacct. VSOE is an accounting requirement that the AICPA requires of software developers to ensure they are not recognizing revenue too early in order to look good to investors.

We'll call my anonymous buyer "Russ". One of the most impressive and likable qualities to Russ about Intacct is their 3rd party ecosystem. This guy did a lot of research and found that all the important other SaaS products that he wanted to work with already had Intacct on their list of products. Salesforce (CRM) and Clarizen (project scheduling) were two that he listed first but said that Avalara (salestax) was a key one for them as well.

He said that Intacct is in the "wheelhouse of integration" and defined that term as meaning that integration already exists-he doesn't have to create it or test it or hope that it works. He said that he preferred the "best of breed" approach to the "suite approach" because in a suite you often get weaker modules. With best of breed you can pick the software and its features rather than getting stuck with a module because it's part of your suite.

In addition to VSOE requirements, Russ has lots of maintenance plans that he needs to remember to bill and then recognize over a whole year. He has deferred revenue that comes in all shapes and sizes due to the contracts they offer to customers.

He is in the process of moving away from both his revenue recognition worksheet and his billing (when to and how much) worksheet. He expects this savings in time and increased accuracy (if someone adds a subscription or user that increases the maintenance amount-something a spreadsheet can't do for you) in invoicing to be large. He will save in revenue leaks as well since once a customer pays their maintenance bill, it's hard to go back and ask for more.

He shared that he only has 120 clients currently on those two spreadsheets but that 2 less "islands of information" are very welcome to him.

For those of you that have read this blog, you may remember this person being very excited about finding a product that could work on-premise first and then be moved to the cloud without any disruption. Well this is the same person that, when he saw, the "rev rec" features in Intacct said-this is what I need to buy.