One of the biggest dangers is failing to keep up with the expectations of current and prospective customers. In 2000, the Fortune 500 top 30 featured major players of the day such as Sears, Enron, Compaq, Lucent, MCI WorldCom, and Kmart Holdings. Being great at a point in time doesn’t mean perpetual greatness.
Steve Jobs summed up his philosophy for Apple: “build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products.” In his biography, he also theorized how companies decline, noting that companies take control of a market and start to slow their pace, putting salespeople in charge and leaving engineers and designers in the background.
Big-time innovation, affordability for growing businesses, the flexibility to facilitate this growth—Acumatica is pretty great. However, if you attended Summit, have been reading our series on the recent R1 2020 release or are attending our upcoming webinar, you know that they’re putting incredible effort into building a resilient and innovative company – without a sales staff.
As a leading Acumatica Partner, we believe in the product and company’s ability to improve. Leading analyst company Mint Jutras agrees.
Innovation Fuels Acumatica’s Growth: An Analyst’s Opinion on Acumatica
In the firm’s annual look at Acumatica, ERP expert and founder of Mint Jutras Cindy Jutras explored Acumatica’s growth, innovation, and updates in the latest release, noting that Acumatica’s claim to “fastest growing” is not only justified, but in fact, Acumatica is “moving away from the pack.”
72% year over year growth in license revenue, 1,300 new customers, nine new user groups, and nearly twice as many attendees at the latest conference, Acumatica is checking the boxes, and appears to be poised for a period of explosive growth.
“Given the growing acceptance of cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS) in recent years, Mint Jutras has been expecting (hoping) to see at least one of the native cloud solution providers enter a period of explosive growth. Thus far we have been disappointed, but now Acumatica appears to be doing just that.
How has Acumatica been able to achieve what others have strived but failed to do? We see several factors combining synergistically to create a perfect storm to drive growth. The common theme across all these contributing factors is Acumatica’s ability to continually innovate, not just in terms of the product, but in terms of its own business model.”
Key Factors Behind Acumatica’s Success
The full report (available here) goes into great detail on the strategy behind the past and future growth, noting a variety of factors behind the success.
Bucking the Trend and Understanding How to Win in the Modern Business Landscape
One of the biggest drivers behind the innovation? The lack of a direct sales force. Unlike most enterprise solution vendors that have a direct sales force, Acumatica works exclusively through partners (VARS, OEMs, and ISVs).
Making Extension Easy
With nearly three quarters of its staff focused on R&D, Acumatica also empowers its partners to extend and configure the product easily. With the introduction of new development platforms, it can and should be much easier to “customize” and extend the functionality of ERP solutions.
Jutras notes that “Partners with specialized expertise often offer extensions to Acumatica ERP that are so seamlessly integrated, users might think they are part of the product.”
Not only does Acumatica make its platform available to all, with no added fees, it also hosts an online Marketplace in which viable, certified extensions can be showcased and purchased.
Customer First
Many vendors play SLA games. Acumatica wrote a customer bill of rights. Like any good bill of rights, the rights promised by Acumatica protect the customer from the overarching power—rather than granting promises. We discussed both the dangers of SLA games and the power of the Acumatica Customer Bill of Rights here.
User-Friendly Pricing
Another example of how Acumatica is innovating as a business is its unique pricing structure. Most other ERP vendors price based on number of users. Per-user licensing is very common, both in the traditional on-premise and the SaaS worlds and anywhere in between.
But it can also raise some barriers to growth. As you add more employees or you expand your implementation to a new department or function within your organization, the user count goes up, and so does the cost. Acumatica is different. Its price is based on the computing resources you use, not on the number of users. Need a price? Just answer a few questions:
- What applications do you want to start using now?
- What type of license are you considering: SaaS Subscription, Private Cloud Subscription, or Private Perpetual License?
- What is your projected level of consumption based on the volume of your business transactions and data storage?
Internal Innovation in Product
One of the most important things for a solution to do is deliver the innovation it promises. Acumatica has to put that R&D department to good use, and they do. From payroll to warehouse, Acumatica has made massive innovation to future-proof its business on three specific pillars:
- A modern technology platform that is future proof,
- Best in class business functionality,
- Increasingly industry specific focus and innovation.
Ali Jani, Chief Product Officer at Acumatica sums it up pretty succinctly, “The world is moving faster, and we have to keep up.” Acumatica does that with two releases a year… every year, like clockwork.
Looking to learn more about these improvements? Check out the full report here, and read our blogs on the latest update.
