Carlton's Insights & Comments
By J. Carlton Collins, CPA
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Carlton's Insights & Comments |
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Bad Timing I think that ACCPAC is a victim of bad timing. It took ACCPAC a fairly longer time to deploy it's 32-bit Windows version of its product for all of its modules, and they completed this task in 1999, just in time for the accounting software recession in 200 & 2001. (It seems that everybody accelerated their purchasing of accounting software prior to 2000 based on the Y2K hysteria). ACCPAC was also a victim of bad timing with its release of eTransact and ACCPAC Online. E-commerce solution will eventually take off and ACCPAC will be ready when they do - but so far sales of all e-commerce solutions have been slow. Similarly, ACCPAC's web-based solution has been slow to catch on as well. It seems that many folks have a problem with the idea of entering their data over the Internet. Looking Forward Bad timing aside, ACCPAC has never been in a better position. They now offer a great breadth of products, great breadth of core modules, many advanced modules, great technology a decent partner channel, and an excellent marketing director in Susan Sheridan. The future has never looked brighter for ACCPAC. Still Room For Improvement Even though ACCPAC is positioned well, there are still a few problem areas that may need attention. Specifically, in a personal discussion with David Hood, I think that David said it best when he stated "I wish that I could get people to view ACCPAC Corporate Series as a high end solution equal to Great Plains or Axapta". David seemed to be frustrated by the public perception that ACCPAC Advantage Corporate Series is not strong enough for larger companies with revenues well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The truth is that ACCPAC Advantage does have a wealth of features and many great add-on solutions. It also runs on the world's top databases, including Oracle and IBM's DB/2. ACCPAC provides the best e-commerce solution in the business with eTransact. ACCPAC provides extensive CRM, Human Resources, and manufacturing capabilities. ACCPAC provides a strong warehouse solution in eWarehouse and a great reporting tool in ACCPAC CFO. In almost every respect, ACCPAC can scale up to challenge the these other high-end products. Nonetheless, I think that David is correct in his assertion that ACCPAC Corporate Series does not garner the accolades it deserves. Why is this? The answer is that there are many reasons that contribute to ACCPAC's image as a solid mid-range solution as follows: 1. Telling Customer Base - It is not easy to position your product as a higher end solution, especially when you have tens of thousands of smaller to medium sized customers using the product. The perception is hard to overcome. In many respects, I think that Best Software has difficulties positioning MAS 500 as a higher end player as well. 2. Lower Price Point - ACCPAC is very affordable and thus generates a perception that it is a mid-range solution. If Tommy Hilfiger had priced his jeans at $35 rather than $80 per pair, you would have never heard the name. ACCPAC's lower price points hurt it's perception as a higher-end solution. 3. Channel - ACCPAC's channel seems to consist of smaller resellers. Compared to resellers for other product lines such as BMI, ePartners, the Aston Group, each of which sells hundreds of millions of dollars in product annually, ACCPAC Advantage and ACCPAC ProSeries resellers do tend to be smaller. Hence, ACCPAC may have trouble landing bigger deals simply because few ACCPAC resellers have the bandwidth to tackle a larger 8-country implementation. 4. Lack of Project Costing - ACCPAC still does not provide a very powerful job cost or project costing solution which hurts it's chances with larger organizations. Just last year I moved a $17 billion organization here in Atlanta off of Oracle and onto Solomon - a product with a fairly good project costing solution. It seems that project Costing is important to larger organizations. Several resellers complained to me at the Conference that Project Costing is still a sore spot for ACCPAC. 5. Web Based Time and billing and Expense Reporting - Since studying SAP in great depth 4 years ago and working with SAP customers, I've finally figured out why people purchase SAP - it has to do with the web-based time and billing entry and expense reporting. In larger organizations, accounting personnel see these two solutions and the show is over. Solomon has won many top deals due to it's web based T&B and expense reports (called Solomon Desktop). In my opinion, this is the single most powerful feature a reseller can show to a prospect - especially a larger prospect who has hundreds or thousands of time reports and expense reports to deal with. 6. Source Code & Customization - Many of today's top products are winning higher-end deals based on their strong customization and source code capabilities. Axapta and Navision are two excellent examples of products that typically appeal to the IT staff and knowledgeable CFOs. ACCPAC Advantage Corporate Series does provide some customization capabilities, but it is not as easy to use as that of Navision's. Further, this product does not provide source code. 7. Complex Installation - Finally one of my pet peeves with ACCPAC is the difficulty in installing the product. Each year I install dozen's of products and usually it takes just 5 minutes to complete the installation off one CD that contains all of the modules. However ACCPAC provides it's product on multiple CD's - one for each module. Further, activation codes must be applied for and usually the system rejects my activation codes. Two years ago ACCPAC announced that they had added a 30 day grace period for activation and the audience applauded louder than at any other time). Once I do get the product installed, I find that several of my other accounting software applications on my computers will no longer run. I can usually count on an ACCPAC installation take a day or two of my time - ouch. In other words ACCPAC has made their installation process so difficult, that many industry analysts like myself find it easier to work with other products. Think about it this way. When I consult with some clients, I usually pull out my Great Plains or Navision CD and install the demo product on their computers in just a few minutes, and leave them installed so that the prospect can try them out. Sometimes I simply send them a CD and let them install it themselves. I find this to be a great sales technique. However ACCPAC resellers would have a much harder time using this technique. Conclusion I am a big fan of ACCPAC and they have come a long way in recent years. I would recommend ACCPAC to virtually anybody, and I do so on a daily basis. - END - |