General Consultant Discussion

For those of you not on twitter and not part of the Acumatica channel, I thought I would share a ""feisty"" response by the president of Acumatica, Jon Roskill, to Sage dropping the ""ERP"" from their accounting product names. http://www.acumatica.com/blog-bright-future-of-cloud-erp-software/

It's really funny to me that as good as the product seems and how channel-friendly they have been so far that their big marketing push has been: Sage sucks! We suck less!

Or Sage puts it, users have been getting a great deal for PR in the past, we had to do a lot of work to stay current with government requirements (NOT making it a better product) and we are going to raise the support pricing to be about what other vendors are charging for their modern versions.

tl;dr (from the Acumatica post): Maybe what IS dead, or at least dying, are the companies who ignore this fundamental shift in the application systems software market by continuing to offer on-premises software only, or legacy solutions ""dressed up"" to look like Cloud solutions, as well as perpetual licensing arrangements which do not meet the needs of SMBs entering the market. Such companies may still be alive for now, but their days are numbered.

Telling me that ""SMB's entering the market"" need ""cloud ERP"" is bullshit. SMB's 'entering the market' don't need any ERP. They need accounting software. Software to generate an invoice, collect payments, and pay bills. With a handful of .com exceptions that will come crashing to the ground in the next few years, mom and pops don't need or use ERP software. And I'll go this further. Sage 100 is NOT ERP software. It does NOTHING relative to 'Enterprise resource planning'. What resources does it plan? Hmm: No forecasting of future inventory (without an add-on) No finite capacity manufacturing, thus no resource planning No real automated purchasing No nothing. It records transactions. Any 'planning' it has is either a bolt on or outside spreadsheets used with the dumps of data it collects in its transactions.

He stole the title from my last blog post! Do you think I can sue? It should be more profitable than selling ERP...

You can sue...as for winning...

Still might be more profitable. Slowly losing....

As for ""Sage sucks!"" @RobertWood , when it's an easy target, you go for it.

@GaryFeldman, that's Nicholas Taleb's philosophy. @BrianRice, I don't fault it. It's just interesting.

A single software company should no longer try to be all things to all people. A base package should only include the basic accounting functions which can help a company manage cash and tax reporting. Beyond that, software should be modular. We should rely on other software companies as experts to create the specialized, complex modules which allow a company to manage its operations and production and plug into the base product. So far, that's where I see products like Acumatica, Intacct, NetSuite, etc leading the pack ahead of Sage's ""one-size-fits-all"" approach. The time when that approach was suitable is now over, methinks. As evidenced by the lack of development in the modules outside of the core modules. Payroll, Job Cost, MRP, BoM, W/O. Even the Timecard module is woefully behind the times. We might be getting old, some of us, but we can't get near-sighted.

@LouWagner - While I agree with you that Sage can't be everything for everyone, end users seem to more comfortable with this approach which Sage is trying to portray with Sage Inventory Advisor, Sage Alerts, Sage Aatrix, Sage Avalara, Sage CRM, Sage Intelligence and to some extent Job Ops, Multi Bin, Website Pipeline, etc. with their ""seamless"" integration. The devil is in the details then. Who do you call when things go south? The CRM people, the Job Ops folks or Sage because it is their core product where the issue manifests itself? Not sure how far away the end is, but I am starting to practice ""Welcome to Walmart, would you like a cart today"" in front of the mirror while brushing my teeth every morning........

You're 100% right, @JeffSchwenk. As I look at what I wrote previously, I realize I came across as sounding like ""old school is bad"" which simply isn't the case. Old school and new school are just two different ways of thinking about the solutions out there and as consultants, we're going to have to do both, at least for a while. Such has always been the case but now, the transition is likely to happen in the next five years (or less) as opposed to giving us a 15 year head start on it. The ""who do you call"" problem has always been an issue when people blame hardware vs software but as you say, we're moving into territory which forces us to figure out how a problem started at a software module level.

I didn't get that impression at all @LouWagner - I think a ""boutique"" approach is a great way of keeping costs in check as well as being able to employ specialists (that know function in addition to code) for that specific module. The BF is supposed to allow modifications to the code without any stepping on toes. This transparency is expected but sorely missing. Maybe one day! But meanwhile, would you like a cart today?????

Yes, gimme a cart. :-) Of course, cost is yet another gremlin. It's no wonder that subscription is the preferred payment option: It helps to hide the true cost, although the typical CFO who approves the ""purchase"" isn't going to be buffaloed by that approach, of course. It does raise a possibility, however, of selling more easily to customers who have tight cash flows and can ""afford"" a subscription more easily than an up front purchase. And to add another gremlin, getting all the demos and info together to make purchase decisions is going to prove to be a bigger nightmare than before. Logistical selling. Where is that boutique again?

We are talking with two Acumatica partners in the next two months about setting up an industry specific cloud for Acumatica as a boutique approach. IF you can focus on a single target market it theoretically should reduce the learning curve (only the functions required for that industry as no company uses 100% of any software), and the marketing and sales efforts should be much more effective with a new product because those people (even if the owner) can rarely answer any industry question on the fly without years of experience.

And there's high value in pulling together those ""pieces"", yet today's buyer expects it to be done for free and has no problem deferring purchase or walking to another VAR and making the purchase at a later date (but with the info you provided for free). Once several components need to be integrated, it would be nice of a project management fee was ever accepted.

The idea of a boutique cloud is pull it together once and sell it many times to make it more affordable.

UPSIDE TO NICHE: - Harder to be replaced by customer - seen as valued asset instead of just another IT vendor - Less price sensitive - Less competition when you are an expert in a field - Focus your marketing activities on a well-defined market - Much easier to sell additional high margin consulting - Takes you out of low-margin ""break-fix"" business DOWNSIDE TO NICHE: - Narrower market / fewer opportunities = lost deals ""sting"" more - Niche's do have competition - and in many cases they're pretty good - Niche requires specialized employees who know the industry - Depending upon market - may require more extensive travel to reach large number of qualified prospects Source: This is what I found when I was marketing to Non-Profits back in my CPA days

I'll agree with Wayne. I've sold products that depend on 3rd parties for a majority of sales (SAP Business One) and products who try to be many things to many people (Epicor) It's alot easier learning SAP because there is simply alot less to learn. You can then absorb 3rd parties as the needs arise. Epicor can be beastly to learn because its loaded with so many modules and so much functionality and interdependency. However reality is, like Wayne said: 3rd parties are often spread out all over the world in 24 hours worth of time zones Many use different technologies. Even when they are all built on some common cloud platform, the way something 'should' work and 'does' work can vary greatly. You can even see this from one IOS app to another. There is always the version hell of keeping everything synchronized. When they aren't all built on a common cloud platform, you have different databases, sometimes different version (product A supports SQL 2014, product B only SQL 2008) For those of you who yell 'we don't have to deal with this with product XXX cloud solution, the vast majority of those cloud solutions only have tiny fraction of the available industries that are needed, and often only at a very basic or narrow scope. Picking a few 3rd party solutions and going after a niche is almost always a failure unless you live in a very specific geography. For example, Yacov was so successful with CRM in NYC because he only did finance. He'd be a failure if he lived in say Dallas. There are only so many of those mega concentrated niches. We have one in NY (apparel) and it still was a nightmare because the majority of prospects are uber cheap. You need a cost effective way to sell and implement nationwide with a niche. The only niche or vertical players I see who make money, are those that own all the IP and spent big bucks developing it. Most of them find they need to sell direct, or via a finders fee to be successful.