From Impacct to Intacct - How SaaS offers immediate returns

In the late 80's Solomon Software (firm that developed Dynamics SL) was still a market leader along with Great Plains (now Dynamics GP).

The firm was having such good success that they decided to create a higher end product for larger clients. This too was going to be a DOS-based product but have rich multi-company and multi-currency features, national accounts and ease of use functions for larger firms.

The future looked very bright for this product as Solomon was making a lot of money and had an amazingly talented Business Analyst in charge of the product's design.

Unfortunately the product kept getting delayed from being released because this brilliant person kept coming up with "one more idea" to make it even better. The product in the end started running up against competitor's that had similar ideas but shipped product sooner, as well as the onslaught of Windows-based products that were being developed.

To me a SaaS model does the exact opposite. What SaaS-based ERP developer Intacct offers is "features right away". Since the software is being constantly improved and moved into production, users don't have to wait for "the big release". Users get constant improvement each quarter with releases that are moved into production for everyone.

Personally I like Dynamics CRM better than Salesforce for CRM. The product enforces more standards so that users have similar experiences rather than allowing each individual user to effectively use the software however they'd like. I also like the option of being able to run Dynamics CRM on premise or in the cloud.

What I miss having selected the on-premise model are all the improvements that Microsoft made with Dynamics CRM 2011. If I were running CRM in the cloud, I would have all of those improvements already instead of waiting for a convenient time to upgrade from Version 4.

Salesforce used to tell us which weekend they were going to do our upgrade and it was not disruptive at all. It was nice in fact to have new features without having to test any of them or wonder if they would work.

So I see this SaaS model with automatic upgrades as something that is remarkably NOT disruptive but productive. While these automatic upgrades are going to cause us as consultants to lose upgrade services revenue, I believe that for clients of products like Intacct-it is a less disruptive option that ensures that clients get their value each year for the fees they pay us to keep current with software.

If you look below at the graph of Intacct's tenure in business, you can see, this is a long time to offer users a product where the user never had to do anything to upgrade the product they were using.

Because we are allowing our hardware to age with the expectation we will move everything to the cloud here at Boyer, we are running into more and more "issues". We are moving more and more to the cloud. This year ERP, next year MS CRM and Exchange, Office 365 in 2014. 99.8% uptime without paying for the inconvenience or disruption of upgrades is looking pretty good to me.

How about you?

Please sign up for an Intacct webinar if you are interested in learning more about this cloud-based ERP offering.

ASAE 2011 – Annual Meeting: Center for Association Leadership

This was a HOT conference in more ways than one. With the temperatures in the 90s and the humidity in the 80% range, we were all glad to be inside the air conditioned America's Center in St. Louis. Despite the air conditioned convention center, it was still HOT inside.

During the conference there were plenty of HOT topics, including social media, membership engagement and at the top of the list - Cloud Computing. The "How Cloud Computing Can Help Your Association Service, Retain and Grow Membership" session was well attended and gave everyone in the audience a basic understanding of the value of cloud-based computing and the services that they can take advantage of to grow and retain their membership. I noticed several people who attended that session on Sunday, August 7th came by the Intacct booth in the exposition hall on Monday, wanting to know more about Cloud Computing and giving us the opportunity to discuss the hottest cloud-based financial and accounting solution for Nonprofits. Many of these organizations are looking to replace their current on-premises financial systems with cloud computing solutions that can offer them the automated control, flexibility and business visibility to efficiently run their organizations.

Speaking of running their organizations more efficiently, I also attended the "Get to Know the Top Five HOTTEST Association Technologies" session. It was so popular I had to sit on the floor because they ran out of space for everyone. Guess what was #1 on the list? Cloud Computing. The audience learned how cloud computing technologies are changing the way associations do business. Like the above Sunday session, the speakers focused on demystifying the five hottest technologies and conveying the benefits of each in layman's terms. Hallelujah – let's keep it simple. Most importantly, all three speakers made the same point about cloud computing – let it transform your association to make your operations more cost-effective and provide you the opportunity to grow your organization with hot innovative solutions.
I am sure next year's ASAE 2012 will be just as HOT – Dallas in August – in more ways than one!!

While you are sleeping, who is managing your IT risk?

Running your own infrastructure is a risky proposition and one which can be overcome by shifting risk to Cloud Computing Vendors. Cloud Computing is becoming more mainstream and promises to gain more popularity in the near future. In a recent post on Datamation (Cloud Computing: The Road Ahead – Datamation ), Damu Kuttikrishnan quoted Gartner:

"By 2014, Gartner predicts worldwide cloud services revenue (both public and private) will reach more than $148 billion. With its latest survey, Gartner received responses from 2,014 CIOs representing more than $160 billion in CIO IT spending and covering 38 industries across 50 countries. The survey found that only 3% of CIOs today have more than half of their infrastructure and applications operating in the cloud. But that number is expected to grow to 46% by 2015, making cloud transformation the hallmark of many CIOs at their current companies."

What does that mean for your organization? Companies are rapidly moving services, applications and infrastructure to the cloud. By doing so, they are actually outsourcing their IT similar to the way we use supermarkets. For example, what did we outsource when we started using supermarkets? We trust that our supermarket will deliver fruit which is free of disease, fresh, and tasty. We don't give it a thought. We line up at the store and buy our apples, quickly rinse them and eat them. We pay a decent price, which is prescribed and agreed to up front, and in that price we "outsource" all the risk of growing apples and maintaining pesticides, harvesting (with heavy equipment), transportation, stocking, cleaning, refrigeration. The supermarket and their suppliers take care of ALL OF THAT! The same is true for cloud computing.

Cloud computing providers can be thought of as supermarkets of infrastructure, data-storage, applications, bandwidth, and services. You sign an agreement with your (reputable and good) cloud provider called an SLA (Service Level Agreement). The SLA is the contract, and a much more specific one than supermarkets provide for apples, which indicates the services you will receive and any and all warranties on those services, including the guaranteed safety of your data, uptime metrics, performance metrics, survivability, data recovery and backup and response time in event of an issue or outage. Wait, that is the same thing you have with your IT guy now, right? (Sarcasm, of course)… Rarely will this kind of an agreement exist with your IT provider whether it be a consultant or your own internal employee.

Now, lets talk about why Cloud Computing providers can issue guarantees. First, a good and reputable provider is going to be housed in a Tier 1 data-center. We are talking redundant generators, HVAC, Man-traps, armed guards. Typically only Fortune 100 companies can afford to host infrastructure in these facilities. But with the economies of scale provided by multi-tenancy, you can host your small-to-medium business or organization's IT infrastructure and applications in these same facilities and receive the same benefit. Think about the value in that. I'm paying less annually than I would pay my internal IT manager to manage 3 to 5 servers and receiving world-class service instead with guarantees of uptime and availability. There just is no comparison.

So is Cloud Computing for everyone? Should every organization move to the cloud? Well, the short answer is yes. The longer answer is, maybe some of your stuff, not just yet, but eventually. The available services are growing rapidly, and, soon enough, you will be able to leverage Cloud Computing for almost everything. But, for now, businesses should consider keeping some infrastructure in place for purposes of running legacy systems, and any system which is custom and proprietary to the business process. In other words, if this piece of software is part of your core competency, and it is not web-based, you should likely keep it in-house for now. Otherwise, start thinking about who can provide the best services and reduce your risk in the Cloud.