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.