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.