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."