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Transcript
Welcome to another AUG Blog Audio Post located at augforums.com. That’s A-U-G-F-O-R-U-M-S dot com. You can find this specific audio post at augforums.com/episode4. That’s audio post and the number four. This is your host, Tim Rodman, coming to you live on Monday, December 9th, 2019, from Columbus, Ohio, where it’s raining today, but people are still pretty happy after the Buckeyes win this past weekend.
In this audio post, we are going to be talking about who uses Acumatica. What types of companies out there are using Acumatica? And I’ve just got a few points here.
The first point is what size company is using Acumatica? And typically the rule that I’ve heard (it’s not really a rule, more of a guideline) is that Acumatica tends to be used by companies with annual revenue of around 10 million a year on the low end to around 500 million a year on the high end. So that’s a pretty broad range, 10 million to 500 million in annual revenue.
But basically I look at it as: you’re too big for QuickBooks, but you’re too small for SAP, Oracle, or recent Acumatica sister company IFS. That tier one solution is SAP, Oracle, IFS, etc., QuickBooks is like a tier three, and tier two in the middle is that mid market: annual revenue of 10 million to 500 million. That’s traditionally been known as mid market ERP and Acumatica is very focused on remaining – from everything I’ve heard and everything I’ve seen – remaining a mid market ERP company.
Next, what type of industries use Acumatica? I think anytime you get into mid market ERP the solutions tend to be very horizontal in nature, meaning they cut across multiple industries. When you’re on the smaller end and more of QuickBooks territory, you see a lot of what would be called vertical solutions that are built for a specific industry. But once you get into true mid market territory, in my opinion, you’re going to see more horizontal solutions. Acumatica is very much that horizontal type solution. So you’ve got companies that are distribution companies running Acumatica, e-commerce companies, even manufacturing companies, construction companies, professional services companies, nonprofits, lots of different types of organizations are running Acumatica because it’s really built as an industry agnostic solution to deliver that back office functionality that every business needs.
Now coupled with that industry point, I also like to mention that Acumatica is not only an ERP solution, and this point gets lost a lot of times, because when you compare Acumatica to the legacy ERP solutions out there, you’re really only talking about the ERP functionality. But Acumatica also has CRM functionality, so there is a full blown CRM module inside Acumatica. And that’s a differentiator because you don’t have to have an outside CRM solution sync data back and forth like you do with legacy solutions. Also, this CRM functionality is not something that Acumatica acquired and put the Acumatica name on, but under the hood it’s two separate products. Rather, it’s all inside the same regular ERP solution: same database, same screens, etc. It was built that way from the beginning, which is very important, as you can see it hooked in to the entire system, that CRM functionality.
I bring CRM up related to the industries because more and more in the digital age it’s very important to be tracking activity before it even becomes an order, even all the way back into marketing and seeing how your customers are interacting with your content on your website, etc. So the fact that Acumatica has got CRM functionality built in, I think, also speaks to what type of companies are using Acumatica because they see the value of having an ERP and CRM solution all in one application.
And the last point I’ll make about who uses Acumatica is the geography. Acumatica is a company that’s headquartered in the United States in the Seattle, Washington area, but their user base is very global and their community is very global. Even the Acumatica company itself, most of their development is done over in Moscow, Russia. They’ve got offices in Canada, in Mexico, in Singapore, all over the globe. And their user base is also all over the globe, driven by two primary things:
First of all, the OEM partners. So OEM partners are companies that already have a large user base in their respective countries. Companies like MYOB, in Australia, Lexware in Germany, and others. You could think of these companies as being like the QuickBooks of their country or their part of the world in that they already have a large group of small companies or small businesses using their software.
Rather than lose those customers to other products, when those customers outgrow the solutions, companies like MYOB, Lexware, etc. have licensed Acumatica on the back end, or under the hood, if you will. And then that enables them to go to market with their own name, but run Acumatica under the hood. Then they’re expanding the Acumatica solution or enhancing it to fit the specific needs of their country. So it’s a pretty cool approach that Acumatica takes to allow companies to do this. And there’s not a lot of them because there’s only certain companies that are large enough to do this, but it helps diversify, in my opinion, the Acumatica end user base.
The second thing related to the global reach is not just the OEMs, but the regular Acumatica partners who are internationally located outside of the United States. Acumatica has partners on every continent, I believe. They’ve got a very strong channel, and I think especially the international aspect of the Acumatica channel, we’re only going to see accelerate in the coming years, especially due to the EQT acquisition that happened this past Summer. So both of those, I think, give a Acumatica a very strong international global user base. And so that’s just further diversifying who actually uses Acumatica.
So we’ve got a focus on the mid market, we’ve got a very horizontal approach to industries, and we’ve got a very global end user base with Acumatica.
Alright, well that’s it for today. Thanks for listening, and I’ll catch you on the next AUG Blog Audio Post. Take care.