Headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, Acumatica is a leading innovator in cloud ERP with customers located around the world. Through its worldwide network of partners, Acumatica provides the full suite of integrated business management applications, including Financials, Distribution, Manufacturing, Project Accounting, Field Service, Commerce Edition, Construction Edition, and CRM.
In an interview with Insights Success, Jon Roskill, CEO of Acumatica shares his journey and details about his contribution to the organization. Below are highlights of the interview between Jon and Acumatica;
Give a brief overview of the company, its uniqueness and its vision
Acumatica Cloud ERP works to deliver adaptable cloud and mobile technology with a unique, all-inclusive user licensing model. This enables customers to have a real time view of their business at any time and wherever they are.
Through Acumatica’s technology, functionality, and growth-friendly business practices, the company delivers exceptional value to small and midmarket organizations, spanning the full suite of business management applications.
What are the cutting-edge ERP solutions offered by Acumatica?
The company is built on a future-proof platform and designed for the way modern businesses operate. The platform includes open architecture for scalability, ease of use, rapid integrations, and is built on a modular and adaptable platform with Open APIs, allowing for low code or no-code customization.
We fully recognize digital transformation is about enabling customer success, and how this success looks different for every customer. This is why Acumatica offers flexible deployment, open integrations and full data transparency. This allows companies to easily adapt when their definition of success changes.
What are the new approaches adopted by Acumatica to advance its ERP solutions?
In every release, Acumatica improves the underlying system to evolve usability and create more efficient customer experiences. This year we announced the official launch of Acumatica 2019 R1 with continued focus on usability and customer satisfaction, as well as Help search with natural language and machine learning that assists users in finding the right information more rapidly while growing “smarter” over time.
The R1 update also provides features and usability enhancements in three areas including the platform, which has been advanced with features such as highlighting inquiries based on conditions, side panel enhancements, and multifactor authentication, among others; general business applications which include updates to both financial management and the project accounting sides; and industry specific enhancements which include new features to order and inventory management, field services, commerce, and manufacturing and construction.
What challenges has the company faced while providing best-In-Class ERP solutions and how is Acumatica serving to tackle them?
As an unknown entrant in the crowded ERP field, we have battled a lack of brand awareness since inception in 2008. Continuous success in the marketplace and industry-leading customer satisfaction scores have helped us in addressing this issue. However, we are in many ways, a dark horse and challenger to the legacy players such as NetSuite, Sage- Intacct, and Microsoft Dynamics.
What are the dynamic factors that enable Acumatica to stay ahead of its competitors?
Acumatica views our customers as business partners, and we are committed to their success. Acumatica’s licensing model, data policies, and support mechanisms are designed to meet the needs of end-users, not shareholders, and are unrivaled in the industry. We are the only business management solution designed for the unique and evolving needs of growing midmarket businesses, enabling us to put customers success at the heart of all operations. Some of these factors include modern, consumption-based licensing, which operates on a pay-as-you go basis that can grow and shrink with business or seasonal needs. There’s no per-seat premium, so technology can scale features.
Additionally, with data ownership, Acumatica’s solution allows customers to decide where to host data whether it’s on the public cloud, in a private cloud, or on-premise. This way customer data is always secure and accessible. Customers are also able to complete a full relational database export at any time —even if the intention is to take the data somewhere else. Comparatively, other vendors lock customers into their datacenters.
With dual layers of support, Acumatica has a vast global value-added reseller (VAR) network focused on delivering the best service in the industry, so the company never competes against channel partners. We match customers with a local implementation partner who knows the industry and their unique business needs; this way customers and partners always have access to dedicated support, as issues and challenges inevitably arise. As a result, Acumatica has the industry’s highest customer satisfaction rating.
What according to you could be the potential future of the Acumatica and how does the company envision sustaining its competency?
With our recent acquisition by EQT Partners, Acumatica’s goal is to form a “powerhouse” of enterprise resource planning companies with our partner company IFS that will eventually generate $1 billion a year in revenues and compete with the biggest players in the ERP business. We expect to increase our workforce by 40 to 50 percent each year.
EQT acquired Acumatica through the same investment vehicle that holds IFS (Fund VII, IGT Holdings). While Acumatica and IFS are well-aligned on customer ethos and focus industries, Acumatica’s sweet spot is small and medium-sized business customers with $20M – $250M USD in revenue; IFS is optimized to serve companies with $250M USD and above.
Provide a quote that best describes the company and its vision.
Acumatica Cloud ERP provides the best business management solution for transforming companies to thrive in the new digital economy. Built on a future-proof platform with open architecture for rapid integrations, scalability, and ease of use, Acumatica delivers unparalleled value to more than 5,000 small and midmarket organizations through a team of 275 worldwide employees and 300 channel partners.
About the Leader
Acumatica CEO Jon Roskill has 25 years of leadership experience in the software business. He joined Acumatica in 2014 after a 20-year career at Microsoft where he led efforts in many areas including product development for developer tools, the business operations, strategy, and marketing for all of Microsoft U.S., and serving as Corporate Vice President for the Worldwide Partner Group – a particularly relevant experience as Acumatica is 100% channel-driven and sells only through partners. As a long-time channel builder, Jon prioritizes Acumatica’s 100-percent commitment to sell with and through partners as a foundational business strategy and values the importance of diversifying the cloud ERP space.
Jon Roskill | CEO | Acumatica
