Posts tagged intacct
Posts tagged intacct
An interesting post from Scott Cytron in Accounting Software 411. He interviews Jim Hart, practice manager of SingerLewak Systems where he oversees the firm’s cloud computing (SaaS) practice.
It’s an interesting read as Jim describes the success that his firm has had with Intacct as a SaaS offering for their clients.
What stands out for me the most is when Scott asks him to describe one of his greatest success stories.
One of our clients is a franchisor providing centralized operations, billing and a call center to more than 60 franchisees across the nation; the business is also rapidly growing. Intacct enabled the client to deploy a central accounting system allowing all of its franchisees to access the system and create expense reports, view dashboards, receive billings and collaborate on financial decisions affecting the overall enterprise.
If this were deployed with traditional on-premise software, our client would have needed to create a secure network and infrastructure for the 60+ franchise locations. Beyond the purchase of servers, operating systems and network services, they would have had to install software on desktops within each location, and maintain that software with patches and upgrades. With Intacct, all they need is their favorite web browser.
The key takeaways for me from this article is that SaaS knocks it out of the park in situations where:
Right now I’m not seeing the demand for SaaS for large numbers of companies who don’t fit into most (or all) of the four above categories. Given time and market pressures I expect that to change drastically.
To capture a more significant market share SaaS will come down in price by a factor of 50% and lose some of the pricing complexity that you won’t learn about until you try to configure a workable setup.
There will always be companies more comfortable keeping their accounting records “in house” on servers they control. These will primarily be transaction heavy wholesale distribution and manufacturing.
I’m watching for SaaS computing to pick up real steam in 2011 and 2012. A SaaS offering is a great tool for CPA firms to provided a higher level of service for their clients while completely removing technology complexity that drove many of them from supporting clients on pre-packages (on-premises) accounting systems.
On premise providers will be forced to look very closely at their offerings and ensure that upgrades not only deliver customer perceived value (my suggestion is that each upgrade contains 12-14 features that wow the bookkeeper - not the IT department) but also greatly streamline the upgrade process.
Upgrades for on-premise solutions are too difficult and some publishers have done nothing more than off-load the labor and troubleshooting to the field rather than make their installation routines trouble free.
The next two years are going to be interesting as SaaS ramps up their offerings and on-premises publishers look to compete. Competition is a good thing in the marketplace and should result in a better overall customer experience.
Intacct today annouced that Oates and Company have joined their partner program. So far as I can tell this is the second large (non-CPA firm) Sage partner to break ranks and add Intacct cloud computing ERP to their product offering. They follow JMT Consulting (interestingly enough headed up by former Sage ERP MIP CEO Kent Hollrah).
Up to now I’ve primarily seen three types of consulting firms join up with cloud based ERP solution providers. These firms were those who had the greatest ability to sell complimentary service offerings along with cloud based ERP:
With the recent announcements of JMT Consulting and Oates and Company I wonder whether we’re about to add a fourth (the traditional ERP partner) to the list.
Will this start the famed domino theory in action?
From Wikipedia:
The domino theory was a theory during the 1950s to 1980s, promoted at times by the government of the United States, that speculated that if one land in a region came under the influence of communism, then the surrounding countries would follow in a domino effect. The domino effect suggests that some change, small in itself, will cause a similar change nearby, which then will cause another similar change, and so on in linear sequence, by analogy to a falling row of dominoes standing on end.
