The Acumatica Summit offered a chance to talk to customers and partners, and to build the Acumatica community as we move forward into a new year with the cloud ERP platform.
The Summit was an informative and engaging experience. On the first day, 2,300 of us heard a keynote by Acumatica’s CEO Jon Roskill. He highlighted some of Acumatica’s achievements in the previous year. These included growing beyond the 6,500 customer mark. Acumatica has been growing annually over the last seven years.
The company also garnered a number of accolades in 2019. They received the PCMag Editor’s Choice Award for Best ERP Software with an “Excellent” rating and 4.5-out-of-five stars. The company was singled out for praise by G2 and Gartner. Nucleus Research’s ERP Technology Value Matrix report also stated that Acumatica “set the standard for usability in the market.”
Roskill’s talk focused a lot on Acumatica 2020 R1, the recent release that was the buzz of the Summit. He linked the new features with digital transformation, sharing, “Everything at the core of Acumatica is about solving customers digital transformation problems.” He emphasized that Acumatica’s goal is to use technology to pragmatically solve business problems, especially customer-centric issues. This was the thinking behind updates to industry-specific versions of the software like Commerce Edition, Manufacturing Edition, Construction Edition, Distribution Edition, and Field Service Edition.
Acumatica made a number of announcements at the Summit. They’re improving Acumatica Manufacturing Edition by acquiring JAAS Systems, for one thing. Acumatica is also now natively building a BigCommerce connection into Acumatica Commerce Edition. The company is partnering with eWorkplace Apps to meet the needs of manufacturers and distributors with integrated solutions for Quality Management and Process Manufacturing Partnering. The Construction Financial Management Association (CMFA) is now partnering with Acumatica to offer a free, one-year membership to all new construction customers.
They announced a free, 30-day trial of the Adobe Sign Enterprise Edition. This includes a new Adobe PDF-as-a-Service, where Acumatica users can view and edit PDFs within their Acumatica system. This occurs through integration with the Adobe Document Cloud. Users do not have to navigate to a new window to work with PDFs.
Digital transformation continued as the theme through the Summit’s second day. Ali Jani, Acumatica’s Chief Product Officer, focused on transformation through innovation in his keynote. He made the point, though, that technology is not everything. Success comes from how “Acumatica combines these technologies together to provide value to our customers with their processes and people,” he said.
Jani delivered more commentary on R1 as well as Acumatica’s large-scale R&D efforts. As he noted, 74% of Acumatica’s employees serve in R&D positions. He shared, “We can change the underlying technology without changing the front ends. We can change processes, but the technology will stay current. As a technology company and a platform company, we completely refresh our platform all the time.”
Overall, the conference was fun and highly productive. If you didn’t make it this year, we encourage you to attend in 2021. To learn more about Acumatica Cloud ERP or see a demo of the product in action, contact us for a meeting.