Archive for the ‘ERP Companies’ Category
Taylor Macdonald Joins SaaS Provider Intacct as VP Channels
Intacct, a market and technology leader in on-demand financial management and accounting applications for businesses and CPA firms, today announced that Taylor Macdonald joins the company as VP of Channels.
Taylor takes over the position from Jerry Jalaba who left Intacct in July 2009 after about a year in the position of VP Channel Sales.
Intacct is a Saas (Software As A Service) provider noted for their Salesforce.com integration capabilities, complete set of financial accounting modules and strong revenue recognition capabilities.
Most consultants first took notice of Intacct in April 2009 when Intacct, the AICPA and CPA2BIZ announced an alliance that resulted in their being named the preferred provider of financial applications. CPA2Biz was also named the preferred distributor of Intacct to the CPA profession. At the time the alliance covered over 350,000 individual CPAs and 45,000 firms governed by the AICPA.
Intacct described the relationship as ” The alliance will help CPA firms and small and mid-sized businesses adopt “cloud computing” to improve their financial performance, take better advantage of financial advice and make better and faster business decisions. Intacct and CPA2Biz will also co-develop a new version of Intacct’s on-demand financial management and accounting applications specifically for CPA firms and their clients that includes unique content from the AICPA“.
Because Intacct is privately held it’s difficult to get an exact measure of their partner channel – or their revenues. Read the rest of this entry »
Sage’s Response To Their MAS Knowledgebase Outage(s)
It’s the second day of Sage MAS90 consultants trying to log into what’s known as the Sage Software Online site.
As of this morning (7/2/10) the Sage knowledgebase used to research technical support issues is down again – either in whole or in part.
This is the latest knowledgebase site outage in what has become frequent enough that that our consulting group routinely downloads and saves major program patches to a fantastically helpful service called Sugarsync (referral link) which allows us to then access the files over the web or from our mobile devices.
We need these patches to ensure that we can deliver an Exceptional Customer Experience to our customers.
For most of yesterday 7/1/2010 the portion of Sage’s support site used by the MAS 90 and MAS 200 consultants who log in over the web to research problem reports and provide support to mutual customers and deliver on Sage’s stated goal of an Exceptional Customer Experience was down.
Other portions of the site for downloading patches and fixes have sporadically been up and down. It looks as if Sage is working to create better redundancy in their servers and apparently as the saying goes – things have to get worse before they get better.
The Sad Depressing State Of ERP Prospects
Click the image at left for a full sized version of an email that I just received not 10 minutes ago. Here’s another from July 1, 2010 where the sender was kind enough to leave in the names of all the consultants that were emailed the RFP (Tip: Never think you’re the only one).
It illustrates part of that’s wrong with the ERP marketplace.
Don’t misunderstand me – it’s not that I think it’s wrong for a prospect to send around this email.
What saddens me is that the prospect likely has at least in part mis-diagnosed their needs – and probably will receive two or three sight unseen quotes from other VARS.
Intuit’s Unbelievable Response to Data Outage
In case you missed it Intuit just suffered through a very public and embarrassing data outage.
By most accounts the outage lasted at least 36 hours.
Repors say it took down some of Intuit’s corporate sites as well as reportedly some of their accounting offerings such as TurboTax Online, Quickbooks Online, Quicken and Quickbase.
Customers are understandably upset. And Intuit’s not the first publisher to have a prolonged data outage. Google, Twitter, Sage – and others have them.
When outages happen other publishers tend to keep quiet about them and not criticize a competitor because they know their turn for an outage could arrive tomorrow.
What’s remarkable about Intuit’s response to the outage is two things. They didn’t use a PR flack to deliver a boilerplate apology (see Apple’s iPhone 4 order snafu apology for a good example of what that looks like)
This morning I noticed something about their apology that I’ve rarely seen a software publisher do.
Craigslist As A Lead Source
This morning I spotted a posting on the free online classified advertisement site Craigslist for MAS90 MAS200 EXPERTS!!!
You can click the image on the left and read the whole advertisement. The bigger question for most consultants is whether these types of free advertising sites work to attract prospects?
Yes! This advertising works. It will attract responses. You may even be busier than you ever imagined – so long as you don’t mind working for three kinds of people (and they all share a common distaste for paying for consulting fees).
Here are the three primary types of prospect you’ll be sure to attract with a free advertisement that primarily offers low cost services.
Sage Insights 2010: Ten Announcements You Missed If You Blinked
Sage North America’s Insights 2010 conference was held last week in Denver Colorado.
While the total numbers of conference goers was never officially disclosed (at least not to me) – it appears there were in the neighborhood of 1,000 Sage partners who attended based on interviews given by Sage leading up to the conference.
Conferences can be great big distracting events. It’s nearly impossible to notice all the news that is released during the event.
Some of the news is released quietly and unless you’re paying close attention – and follow up with questions it can be easy to miss. I think there were at least ten important announcements that went relatively unnoticed at this years’ Insights 2010.
Here are the 10 announcement that I caught which I’m not sure if everyone noticed.
Sage Insights 2010: Wave At Us
During May 17 – 20, 2010 we’ll be attending the annual Sage Insight reseller conference. This year it’s being held in Denver Colorado.
One of my pet peeves about conferences is that they’re so damn big that you can quickly lose people in the crowd. My favorite activity is to find friends and compare notes about sessions that we’ve attended and about ideas for the coming year.
None of this collaboration works well if you can’t find the people you want to compare notes with. Even entering the keynote sessions I’ve found it difficult to locate people in the sea of faces (over 2,000 people are expected at Insights).
This year I’ve started a test group to collaborate in real time using Google Wave to collaborate on Sage Insights sessions. So far we have 60 87 people who’ve joined our Insights Google Group.
Using Google Wave, anyone who is a member of the group can join, read, create and edit the notes that others take during the sessions. Have a question for another participant? Google Wave is a great place to ask other participants. Have an observation or question during the keynote? You’ll be able to share that with the group as everyone jointly creates notes and shares their thoughts on Wave.
This is strictly an unofficial group – Sage is not sponsoring it or endorsing it – though we invite them to steal the idea and improve upon it for next year’s conference.
You can take a quick peek at the main Insights 2010 Wave or join in the fun using these instructions to join the Sage Insights 2010 Google Wave. Or if you prefer you can follow the Twitter feeds (over 120 users) who will be at Insights and Twittering about the happenings by viewing our Sage Insights 2010 Twitter Feed Group.
SEO Just Got 9 Times Harder – Content 9 Times As Valuable
In case you’ve missed it Google recently updated their search layout.
Instead of always returning standard search results as indexed within Google – the search giant now displays a total of 9 additional places that a searcher (aka prospective client) can find your company.
Nine!
Just when you thought that SEO was a snap and all you had to do was throw a few hundred keywords up on your firm’s home page – the game is suddenly changed.
Actually the game has been changing for years. Blogs have emerged as relevant research tools. Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook have enabled our customers to reach out to their friends for recommendations as opposed to relying upon raw searches through Google or other easily gamed Internet search engines.
Is there a way for you to keep up with all these changes? I think so – and it’s been right in front of your nose all along.
Sage H1 2010 Earnings: North America Subscriptions Decline 2% Against Growth Elsewhere
Sage UK just reported H1 2010 earnings for the period ended March 2010.
There seems to be some improvement overall, and earnings exceeded analyst expectations, but the company fell short of predicting a return to revenue growth in North America (which now is second to Mainland Europe as Sage’s top revenue provider).
North America appeared to suffered as the region with what appeared to be the only decline in subscription revenue (see the full Sage slide deck below for details).
Maintenance is the ever important recurring revenue item that customers pay for ongoing support, new releases and upgrades of their existing software.
In a perfect world maintenance would continue to grow (Sage North America reported an addition of 17,000 support contracts) as new subscribers are added and continue to renew their contracts.
Here’s what Sage reported for subscription growth (see chart below for details):
North America: – 2%
UK: +5%
Mainland Europe: +2%
Rest of World: +13%
I’ve long said that maintenance (subscription) renewals and growth are what I gauge to be the key indicators of customer happiness. Within the past year Sage North America has modified subscription margins for many of their business partners (raising sales performance requirements as well as outright margin change). It’s tough to say what the results would have been without those modifications.
Full earnings slide deck after the jump
Intacct Survey Say’s Software Execs See Recession Ending
Intacct, a SaaS provider of accounting and ERP solutions endorsed by the AICPA and used by many industries including software companies, say’s that there just may be a light at the end of the recession tunnel.
From Intacct SVP of Marketing and Business Development Dan Druker’s Post:
In the fourth quarter of 2009, we started to notice our Software industry customers provisioning more users in large numbers and subscribing to more modules too – which I took to mean they were coming out of the recession. This trend only accelerated in the first quarter of 2010 – leading to Intacct putting together record quarters for both Q4 and Q1, dramatically exceeding our plan.
Around the first of the year I was talking about this trend with MR Rangaswami, the CEO of Sandhill group, who is an old friend from past lives at Oracle. We thought it would be interesting to put together a formal research project to understand whether the resurgence Intacct has seen in its software customers is more broadly true in the Software industry as a whole.
They’ve commissioned a study by Sandhill Group of 100 software company executives after noticing improved new Intacct user (seats) license demand in the fourth quarter of 2009. The results of the survey, as well as a copy of the data, will be unveiled in an April 29 webcast. Follow the link below to register and read Dan’s full post.
Bye Bye Recession – Led by Cloud Computing, Software is Roaring Back
