Ohio Trending Upward: Acumatica, Lebron James, the Republican National Convention, and Microsoft Excel

I was planning to do a post this week on the email features in Acumatica, but the announcement by Lebron James last Friday was such HUGE news here in Cleveland that I thought this post would be better. I’ll pickup the email features post next week.

Lebron James and the Republican National Convention

If you haven’t heard yet, Lebron James will be returning to the Cleveland Cavaliers next season which is big news for Northeast Ohio. I was at the chiropractor in the middle of getting adjusted when the news came over the TV. The guy in the waiting room started yelling and time seemed to stop for a moment. Everyone here is very excited to finally see some good news for Cleveland. Bill Simmons the sports writer even reversed his famous phrase, “God hates Cleveland” and wrote an article entitled “God Loves Cleveland” (click here). Even if you aren’t a sports fan, you have to admit that Lebron’s decision will have a HUGE economic impact on this area. Even bigger though is the impact that it has on the psyche of the average person here. We don’t have to look at the floor now and mumble when we say where we are from. We can say where we’re from with our head held high.

Also in the past week came the announcement that the 2016 Republican National Convention will be held in Cleveland. This will generate a lot of positive publicity on a national level for a city that is usually only in the national news for negative reasons. Things are looking up here in Cleveland.

Acumatica in Ohio

It’s almost like Acumatica anticipated all of this and planned to establish a presence in Ohio. I’ve been watching the job postings on Indeed.com because I’m curious to see who is using Acumatica. That’s how I knew that Larry Flynt is using Acumatica (click here). Since February of this year, I count 27 jobs that have appeared with “Acumatica” somewhere in the description on Indeed.com. Of these 27 jobs, 7 of them are for the actual Acumatica company in the Columbus, Ohio area (Westerville suburb to be exact).

Acumatica used to be headquartered in the Washington, DC area and they still maintain an office there. They are now headquartered in the Seattle, WA area and their development team is primarily in Moscow, Russia (click here). So what’s going on in Columbus? It seems like the Acumatica company might be looking to establish something there. Also interesting to note is that the Acumatica JAMS Manufacturing module was made by a company which is headquartered in Reynoldsburg, another Columbus suburb. One has to wonder if Columbus is going to become some kind of hub for Acumatica. The timing is definitely right since Ohio is trending upward.

Microsoft Excel and Ohio

Microsoft Excel has long been the leading Business Intelligence product in the world. Most companies make their most important decisions based on models and reports generated in Excel. In the past couple of years, Microsoft has doubled-down on Excel and made a HUGE investment to expand the features by introducing Power Pivot, Power View, Power Query, and Power Map. This year they began to port the functionality into Office365 by introducing Power BI. All of this puts Excel at the center of the Microsoft Business Intelligence strategy moving forward.

These recent moves by Microsoft make it even more important for ERP products to allow you to tap into their data from Excel. This is definitely on the radar at Acumatica. We just have to vote on it to increase the priority (click here to vote).

Ok, so what does Microsoft Excel have to do with Ohio? Well, Ohio has long been the home of Bill Jelen, who probably knows Excel better than anyone else on the planet. He runs the leading Excel website called MrExcel.com and he lives in Akron. However, newer to the Ohio-Excel-scene is Rob Collie. Rob lives in Cleveland and he runs the world’s leading Power Pivot website called PowerPivotPro.com. Power Pivot is the recently added feature that allowed Microsoft to put Excel at the core of their future BI strategy because it enables sophisticated data modeling and data warehousing in Excel.

A Strange Coincidence

And, by a strange coincidence, my wife and I are moving to Columbus in a month. We moved from Los Angeles to Cleveland a little over three years ago. Now we’re re-locating to Columbus since my company is allowing me to work remotely four days a week. I’ll be getting to know the stretch between Columbus and Cleveland very well when I start making the commute one day per week.

So, once a week I’ll be travelling from a potential future Acumatica hub (Columbus), through MrExcel.com territory (Akron), and spending the day in PowerPivotPro.com territory (Cleveland).

Ohio Trending Upward

It’s a great time to be in Ohio. Who knows, maybe Ohio will become a major player in driving the future of ERP with Acumatica and Excel-based reporting.