The Hammer and the Nail with ERP Options

We once had a developer that worked with us at Boyer & Associates that said “if the only tool in your tool belt is a hammer…everything looks like a nail”. 

Does that mean that if we only offer one ERP product that runs on premise that our business is like the carpenter above?   Well, yes.

We recently picked up Intacct as an accounting software option for a number of reasons.  We love our existing Microsoft-based products and have hundreds of satisfied clients with Dynamics GP and Dynamics SL. 

Groups that offer only one ERP product cannot possibly be objective about what they recommend to clients.  They may be more resourceful at times about how products get shoe-horned into clients businesses-but they can’t present a “better option”.

For example, in picking up Acumatica, we thought we had all bases covered because the product itself runs either on Microsoft Azure as a hosted option or it runs on-premise (the swiss army knife of deployed ERP systems).  Only recently did I start to understand that some users WANT to be forced to upgrade at a time that the developer tells them.  This is what keeps them current.

If they have a fair amount of customizations and integrations-there is never a convenient time to upgrade and its expensive to upgrade.

This is what forces their ISV (Independent Software Vendor) community to write code that can be upgraded by the developer themselves who is hosting the solution.  It’s finally making sense to me why so many people use Salesforce, Clarizen, and are starting to buy Intacct or the Software as a Service (SaaS) model more and more. 

Other people hate this model because the vendor locks the software onto their server and “good luck getting it back”. 

Acumatica, a very nice product, leaves the upgrading to the consultant or end-user regardless of the platform that the product runs on. 

Both products can be considered cloud options regardless of where deployed as they run in a browser in a .net environment. 

Dynamics SL and Dynamics GP offer very capable and deep functionality for the large numbers of people that already have an IT staff and don’t want to lose or shrink that asset. 

There are concerned consultants that believe selling cloud software will undermine our ability to sell upgrade and installation services.  They are right.  We simply have to find something else more valuable to offer to clients.