When it comes to events, I like to sum things up in terms of just one word. For Acumatica 2020 that word is BLOSSOM.
The investments that Acumatica puts into this solution just continue to blossom.
The new integrated Payroll system looks to be very robust considering it’s an initial release.
Plus, the acquisition of JAAS Systems to provide a leading manufacturing solution. This is going to allow them to move the product along even faster than it could as an OEM product.
Those are huge investments that are being made to expand the solution.
Then the fact that you have 600 pages of release notes just for the changes for the new version. There are so many improvements taking place across all of the modules in the Acumatica Suite.
Another big investment was around BigCommerce, which is natively built within Acumatica Commerce Edition. Based on what I heard, the number of hours that it will take to have this completely integrated B2B and B2C e-commerce platform linked into Acumatica makes it by far the most tightly integrated ERP to e-commerce interface I’ve seen in all my years.
It was impressive to me to hear about that partnership with Batchmaster Software for process manufacturing. BatchMaster has been in the Microsoft space for a long time. The fact that somebody like BatchMaster is not just going to bring their solution to bolt on to Acumatica, they are going to use the XRP platform, that is big. These companies are embracing the tool set. They’re not just bringing their product and building a couple of interfaces that sync data back and forth. They’re building their industry specific methodologies into the product using the platform. That to me speaks volumes because anybody can take their app and make it work with another solution. But these guys are going to jump in, bring their industry expertise into a product, use that tool set to create their product. That means it is going to be a more tightly integrated solution when they are finished. But it also means they are buying into more than just a relationship with the company. They are embracing everything around it.
Acumatica showed some very future looking technologies too, which speaks to the level of sophistication that this platform allows with Artificial Intelligence (AI). There was a live demo on stage of submitting an expense report. There are a lot of applications these days that allow you to take a picture of your dinner receipt, and submit it as an expense, see the approval and get paid. But in this demo, all the functionality was inside Acumatica, part of the core product. And on the mobile app. And they can do things like optical character recognition, so it started to fill in the right fields automatically. They even alluded to some machine learning being part of this going forward.
The fact that you have this level of capabilities in the platform from Acumatica makes me ask, “What will they think of next?”
Every year I’ve been surprised at what they do. When I leave, I just realize how much work is possible with this and I look forward to the next year’s event. I know there will be something new.
The Enterprise Software Podcast interviewed a lot of different people at the event. To me it sounded like people coming to Acumatica want to be part of this wave, because all of them feel like there is something special about Acumatica and its platform. In my mind that speaks volumes about the leadership of Acumatica and for us, the Partners, that are selling this solution.
In my interview on the podcast I used the term momentum on the flywheel from my favorite book “Good to Great” by Jim Collins. I truly feel like Acumatica has a lot of good momentum behind the flywheel right now and people are wanting to jump on this platform. I talked to a lot of the ISV Partners that I know from years ago that are now involved with Acumatica. They’re just coming in droves to this product, and the ones I talked to really love Acumatica.
The relationships are blossoming, the solution is blossoming.
I can’t wait to see what word will describe Acumatica Summit 2021.
By George Mackiewicz, CAL Business Solutions, www.calszone.com
