General Consultant Discussion

My summary of SaaS presentation at ITA Fall 2011 collaborative. This session featured a Q&A with Jackie Tiso of JMT Consulting about her experiences with Intacct (which they started reselling in October 2010).

The missing questions to JMT: 100% of their Saas customer are on support. How many of their customers are Saas? How many Non saas did they sell YTD and how many saas YTD? What I'm saying, is its no secret that saas is recurring revenue and saas shoppers are only interested in saas solutions. The question is how many companies are buying saas vs. non-saas? Also, most saas ERP solutions seem to tend to focus on financials which is where a non-profit var specializes. How much traction is their at a manufacturer with warehouse and shop floor data collection and handheld needs?

Interesting Comment by Jackie

Everybody wants to blame the IT department for the problem, but unless your IT department wrote all the software from the OS on out, the blame is misplaced (well, IT could be incompetent, but the the solution to that is to make the IT department competent). We have come to accept a quality level in software that is the equivalent of lead based paint on toys with a sign that says ""lick me"". Those that move to SAAS thinking the problem will go away just because the IT department does will be in for rude awakening, with the blame shifting to ""your internet connection"".

@MarkChinsky Jackie says they are selling 10:1 MIP to Intacct. JMT first signed with Intacct in October 2010 so the sales history is probably not great for forecasting - -though I think Jackie's comments about adapting the model are very good. I think it's also very dangerous to look at initial sales and assume that if JMT sells 10:1 that this ratio will continue forever (A good example is the Android smartphone operating system which really sold barely anything the first year). I do however share similar concerns that I think you're hinting at -- namely how many people attending these webinars (Taylor claims they get upward of 400) are tire kickers who fall out quickly due to price and will the market really adopt these more expensive solutions

@PhilMcIntosh I think there are a lot of internal issues with IT departments unrelated to ERP. I have one customer looking to spend upwards of $30k on SQL just because their IT department isn't trusted to backup their data (they just lost two years of data after the IT department moved to a ""redundant disaster recovery"" center. I guess you could say the disaster recovery project - was, well, a disaster. They're in the process of backpedaling and blaming MAS90 because it wasn't SQL for having the problem when none of their other SQL products ON DIFFERENT SERVERS had the issue.... I see this day in and day out -- the battles between IT and users are going to be a material factor in many organizations wanting to just offload this whole headache.

After one year we ended our Intacct relationship. Their AICPA deal offers no protection for the VAR that makes the initial contact and all the legwork. We found more and more of our prospects choosing to purchase through their CPA because of the cost savings. For example, We drove two hours to meet with a well qualified prospect, only to walk into the meeting to find the prospect's CPA also sitting at the table. After our phone converstion with the prospect, he was so excited about Intacct that he told his CPA about it and the CPA then did some research and found the AICPA offer. So we spent 4 hours in the car and 2 hours in a meeting to sell Intacct for the CPA to his client. If the client ends up buying the highly discounted Intacct through their CPA firm and their highly discounted AICPA price, the VAR gets nothing. If the CPA's client outgrows the limits of the AICPA model and purchases their own full license, the VAR gets nothing. The VAR is not even guaranteed ROR with the client that was once your prospect. Intacct does not have an alignment model in place for CPA firms. At least Sage has the SAN so you can benefit from any future sales from your relationship. Taylor doesn't see a problem with this model. I suppose it works for some, but it sure didn't work for us.

@WayneSchulz, I had one of my customers a couple of weeks ago tell me I was the only person she knew in IT who knew what they were doing (and we don't even do IT work, just ERP). This was after their new hosted server provider moved MAS 90 from one server to another without telling us, didn't realize where the TS clients' MAS 90 was pointing at, had problems (unrelated to MAS), and unilaterally moved the data from the new server to the old one (which the MAS 90 clients had actually been pointed at all day) and overwrote a day's work. So in this case the ""cloud"" did not protect them from incompetent IT.

We could enter in a lengthy holy war so I'll agree to disagree on what the term cloud really means.

My point is that moving the server's location does not necessarily mean you will get better IT people.