Acumatica: A Break Through in Digital Transformation

Digital disruption is happening to organizations large and small, regardless of industry, and yet, the path to complete digitalization is often far less clear-cut for small and mid-scale organizations. Their fundamental challenge is not only the scarcity of right-sized and right-priced technology offerings in the market, but also their ability to adopt and incorporate new solutions into their current IT environments. While big companies have dedicated teams to assist in their digital transformation, mid-tier organizations function on tighter budgets and are often restricted by legacy applications and products at the very core of their businesses.

“The road to complete digital transformation starts with a modern system at the heart of a business, and this is exactly what we bring to the table,” says Jon Roskill, CEO of Acumatica, a Cloud ERP company. “We believe that business management applications should align to your business processes. You shouldn’t have to fit your business workflows around the limitations of legacy software.”

Through Open APIs and cloud-to-cloud integrations, Acumatica pulls together all the isolated applications and systems of a customer’s organization into a single symphonic system or “single version of the truth.” This central source of information significantly reduces silos within the organization and fosters increased efficiency, better informed decisions, and overall company growth. Acumatica also offers consumption-based licensing to its customers. This model readily adapts to customer needs, allowing them to pay only for the resources they are using within the cloud. Some may process a few orders per day while others do more than a million orders per week. Summarizing the success of Acumatica’s customer-centric business model, Roskill says, “One of our customers who started with Acumatica with $20 million in revenue, was hitting $120 million in the second year with a prospective growth of $400 million to follow the year after.”

The Genesis

Acumatica was founded in 2008, during an exciting time of technological evolution as cloud computing, iPhones, and HTML5 were reshaping the market.

Acumatica’s inception was fueled by the idea of cloud-based ERP applications that could shift the value proposition for mid-level organizations. The founders of Acumatica created a cloud ERP software with HTML5 web interface and SOAP web services, providing the company with a solid base on which to build future technology—a clean and elegant architecture right from the ground up. “We shipped the first version of the product in late 2010,” says Roskill. “Ever since then we have been developing new versions of the product and releasing two editions annually.”
Though a relatively young company in the ERP space, Acumatica has, over the course of a decade, continually enhanced its features and developed exciting new capabilities. Recently, the company released its 2018 R1 edition, with a wide range of new functionalities across all major modules of the product offering. 2018 R1 edition complies with the new accounting standards of ASC 606 and is designed to manage both recurring revenue and deferred revenue in the financial part of ERP systems. The product’s distribution module has been optimized so customers can directly integrate their ERP systems with Amazon and eBay marketplaces. Additionally, it offers customers a choice of whether the shipping has to be fulfilled by Amazon or the merchant. As an inside feature, the product also has its own CRM system that utilizes the same central database as the rest of the system. It is a truly unique feature that eliminates the need for double and even triple entries, typical with standalone CRM offerings and eliminates the need for complex integration with tools like SalesForce.com.
The Business Edge

Acumatica’s platform has also been gaining tremendous traction in both technical and commercial markets. Elaborating on the platform’s market appeal, Roskill points out that there are more than a half dozen regional OEMs around the world who white-label the Acumatica product for their own ERP offering. He then shares the success story of Florida-based, xByte Technologies, a fast-growing computer and network product distributor that manufactures custom servers and racks. After running Acumatica for a year, the company today brings exceptional custom configuration capabilities in delivering server products to its customers.

In a similar story, Global Wide Media, a Los Angeles-based company that manages multi-million dollars worth of advertising inventory, was able to dynamically match, price, and merge the data within the Acumatica financial solutions.

According to Roskill, Acumatica’s knowledge base and the dexterity to deliver on the exact needs of the customer is highly attributed to the workforce at Acumatica. Roskill states, “Unlike other firms that have a dominant focus on sales and marketing, more than 73 percent of the company’s workforce consists of innovators and technologists who specialize in engineering and research and development.” Since the company’s sales and distribution operations are entirely carried out by their channel distributors, the primary focus of the company revolves around product development, integration, and innovation. “We have a unique blend of people who live and breathe technology and are equally excited to figure out how their technology can be applied to solve customer problems.” Growing tremendously on the technological front, Acumatica’s developers have been paramount in driving innovation in the field of ERP. Acumatica is accredited as the developer of the world’s first mobile ERP solution and also became the first platform to integrate ERP with Amazon Alexa. “Acumatica presently is a fully featured product set, albeit, with time we will continue to add bells and whistles to it,” remarks Roskill.

"The road to complete digital transformation starts with a modern system at the heart of that process, and this is exactly what we bring to the table"

With a highly customer-centric model, Acumatica has developed a proven approach to modernizing its customer’s business. Operating with a vast network of channel partners, the company helps its customers get in touch with the right partners and the combined expertise can reliably guide them through their transformational journey, all at an affordable price point. Going forward, Acumatica plans to apply AI and machine learning through smart assistance that could automate frequent tasks common to accounting. The company is also investing in driving innovation in natural language user interface that will enable the customers to talk with their ERP product. Given the platform’s rich integration capabilities, Acumatica’s innovative team will be integrating IoT and blockchain technologies to further add value to the mid-market ERP space. “Looking at the present cloud-enabled businesses going after amazing scenarios, we are immensely excited to see what the next-generation technology is going to allow us to do for our mid-sized customers,” ends the CEO.