By TC Doyle

ACUMATICA PARTNER SUMMIT — Watch out NetSuite, Acumatica and its partners are coming after your franchise.

To be sure, the Seattle-based upstart in the world of cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) and management software is going after every competitor in this market — and taking share from many of them, said Acumatica CEO Jon Roskill.

This week in Denver, Acumatica turned its 2014 Partner Summit into a spectacle of business technology, sales momentum and partner success. Among other things, it previewed the latest version of its cloud-based business management software platform, version 5.0, showcased ISV momentum and commitment, and honored some of its best partners.

At the event here in Broomfield, Colo., which sits mere miles from downtown Denver in the shadows of the Rocky Mountains, more than 400 business partners, ISVs, press and analysts have converged to hear the latest from Roskill and his associates.

It’s been roughly six months since the former Microsoft channel boss took over as CEO of Acumatica. Roskill kicked off the event with a recap of where he has been and what he has observed. Among other things, he lauded Acumatica’s technology prowess and its partner commitment. He also said key decisions such as standardizing on the Amazon Web Services platform have significantly strengthened the company.

Roskill also addressed some of the shortcomings that he found after joining. Documentation, the kind that developers and partners depend on, for example, was inconsistent at best. So was territorial coverage. When he arrived, the company had good partner representation in some parts of the U.S., but oddly, next to nothing in upper New England. New York City had only one partner covering the metropolis. Today, the company is expanding its partner base internationally and filling in gaps in the U.S. It could still use more partners in the Northern Great Plains and the Deep South.

“We’re moving from quantity to now quality,” said Roskill of his recruitment efforts. “We want organizations that are going to lead with Acumatica, train their people around our technology and develop deep expertise.”

As for sales momentum, the company announced its 1,000th customer and said that growth is above 50 percent year over year. SaaS growth alone is up 80 percent year over year and renewals are nearly 100 percent. What’s more, Roskill said he has set his sights on creating a market around the Acumatica platform for ecosystem partners that is worth north of $1 billion. By comparison, he believes the partner opportunity around NetSuite to be three to four times larger. But Acumatica is growing faster, he noted, and not competing with partners for any of the market opportunities its technologies create.

Speaking of technologies, Acumatica debuted the 5.0 beta version of its platform for the first time in public at the partner summit. Partners applauded when they saw the new mobility framework, the new customizable interfaces and announced support for MySQL and Amazon RDS.

In addition, the company also showcased third parties that have made strong commitments to Acumatica’s Cloud xRP Platform, including AutoStar Solutions, Housing System Solutions, JAMIS and others. In many instances, these companies are using the Acumatica platform as a way to transport their legacy capabilities to the cloud. And thanks to Acumatica’s unique Web architecture and unlimited user-licensing scheme, they are helping partners drive Acumatica deeper into organizations than any enterprise management platform has gone.

“Other ERP systems have been purposely constrained inside organizations due to cost and complexity. But Acumatica extends down to even casual users, empowering organizations more than ever before,” said Mary Abdian, president and CEO of The Macabe Associates Inc., a Seattle-based software consultancy that has partnered with Acumatica.

Like others, Abdian said there is clear momentum and enthusiasm for what Acumartica is doing to make end customers rethink what is possible in the cloud. Other partners on hand said much the same.