Cloudy with a big chance of ERPs

Acumatica enables business shift to cloud computing

MANILA, Philippines - You could very well say that the forecast for tomorrow is cloudy.

The pervasiveness of cloud computing has helped it emerge as a viable, easily deployable, and cost-effective way to do business. While its success largely hinges on the robustness and adequate coverage of mobile broadband, the trend toward universality is undeniable.

For enterprises seeking to capitalize, Washington-based Acumatica, the world’s leading provider of cloud business management software, employs cloud and mobile technology along with a “unique, customer-centric licensing model” to present a suite of fully-integrated applications. The solutions it delivers represent best global practices infused with “local and industry-specific requirements.”

In town recently for its first-ever solutions tour roadshow, Acumatica underscored the importance of the territory in its business. “For us, the Philippines is not only a large market (in Southeast Asia), it also stands out… Cloud and the adoption of cloud products within the business community in the Philippines is equally good and important as anywhere in Southeast Asia, in Asia, and in the rest of the world,” began Acumatica international operations president Laurent Dedenis, in a press conference. “The Philippines is a fantastic market where mobile adoption has been very strong where social media usage is very developed,” Dedenis said.

Dedenis revealed that, according to Gartner, the Philippines ranks 10th in Asia with its 44 million users of mobile Internet – growing at a rate “faster than many other markets.” Not surprisingly, social media remains a key driver to mobile adoption. Only Indonesia surpasses the country in terms of social network usage in the region.

The advent of a mobile lifestyle has permeated the country’s workplace as well, with 83 percent of small-to-medium enterprise employees spending almost a quarter of their time outside the office, “relying on mobile devices and online cloud-based tools for communication and productivity.”

These developments all serve to highlight the importance of evolving practices to suit the earnest arrival of the digital age of big data, the Internet of Things (IoT), robots and drones, 3D printing, digital currency, quantum communication, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence.

Acumatica CEO Jon Roskill, also present for the caravan, described the company as “having big ambitions,” and shared that they are suitably headquartered “just outside Seattle – 10 miles east of Amazon and 10 miles west of Microsoft.”

Roskill extolled the virtues of the company’s software built on ERP (enterprise resource planning) platform. It’s all about empowering everyone in the business, he declared. “In the world of the IoT, we believe the ERP is going to become the center point of the business, and everything else is going to be connecting around it.”

Essentially an integrated suite of business management software applications, organizations utilize the system to collect, store, manage, and interpret data from many business activities (such as) product planning, manufacturing or service delivery, marketing and sales, inventory management, and shipping and payment.

Roskill said ERP software that leverages on the cloud dispenses with an old licensing system that could cost up to $1,000 per user. “We think it’s wrong,” he insisted. “if you’re going to put in a system for the business, access should be given to more people. That will make the business run better.”

The Acumatica executive explained: “Basically, before PCs, the only companies that had any software like this where the biggest companies in the world because the systems cost tens of millions of dollars.” In the 1980s, basic accounting started to be performed in DOS (disk operating system) screens. The client/server setup of the ‘90s boosted efficiency and tracked growth while making the system available for less than a million dollars. This “next step forward,” termed by Roskill had a drawback though: It was chained to a desktop.

By the time the new millennium rolled in, companies had switched to web-based systems, although they were not really designed to work in the cloud and proved difficult to customize. These worked on old Oracle software using a web client, said Roskill. Acumatica’s cloud ERP solution, he maintained, is a “real, cloud-architected product” that is “easy to integrate” while boasting an “extensible platform.”

Acumatica also supports multiple screen sizes, which makes it an universal solution that can be deployed at the office or in the field. Aside from the flexibility and ease of use, Roskill boasted that it is highly configurable for either private or public cloud domains. “And our pricing model lets you pay for what you use.” It can run on either Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure which again gives the luxury of choice to the consumer. Stressed Roskill: “We’re not tied to any particular data center.”

Who should ponder using Acumatica’s next-generation cloud business solutions with deep vertical-specific expertise? Those in the sectors of retail, manufacturing, business intelligence, warehouse management, distribution management, and such can benefit immensely by being able to “address their business and management needs – from warehousing to retail management, from accounting to human resource management, and from data management to business intelligence – quickly and in a cost-efficient manner through cloud and mobile platforms.”

One of the housekeeping requisites when growing a business is to have an audit trail, stressed Roskill, to make sure that “people aren’t stealing, and government taxes are being recorded… (It’s also for) customers that require compliance.”

Acumatica’s distribution module is a popular function as well. Some 63 percent of customers utilize it manufacturing, warehouse-management, distribution, and points-of-sale activities. The ERP solution also proves invaluable in tracking expenses and costings across multiple projects.

In reply to a question from The STAR, Roskill averred that the Acumatica cloud ERP solution’s strength is keenly in “finance, distribution, and supply-chain management,” and it can serve very large organizations with sophisticated processes such as complex inventory management. “CRM is built-in into our product – it’s not an add-on. It’s a key differentiator,” he said.

The Philippine portfolio of customers for Acumatica presently has “several dozen customers,” joining a global count of 1,200 clients. As the fastest-growing player in the ERP space, Acumatica is growing at a rate above 100 percent year-on-year in some segments. The momentum appears to be growing, too. “That’s the great thing about the cloud is that you’re not capped on the other end,” observed Roskill.