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Acumatica Thursday announced the release of its latest cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) product, Acumatica 6.

New features include: an Acumatica add-in for Microsoft Outlook; dashboards with a large selection of visualizations, pivot tables and Microsoft Power BI; and a new, contract-based representational state transfer (REST) application programming interface (API).

Acumatica’s customers are small and midsize companies.

Jon Roskill, Acumatica’s CEO, tells Channel Partners that the overall ERP market is growing at 4-5 percent, while the cloud-based ERP segment is growing by about 25 percent.

“And a lot of that is happening as the cloud platform itself is driving a re-platforming transition,” he said. “So for partners, it’s an opportunity to pick up a new platform, a new offering like Acumatica and participate in that fast-growing segment of the ERP market with the customers that are moving to the cloud.”{ad}

ERP generally is not going to be the first workload that a company moves to the cloud, Roskill acknowledged. Most companies already are running things like email or CRM in the cloud, he said.

“They’ve gotten comfortable with that, and we’re now at a stage where they’re ready to take on the core business applications,” he said. “So our estimates, and we synchronize with the analysts on this, is today only about 15 percent of customers/end users are running ERP in the cloud and that over the next five years we expect another 60-70 percent to move. So this is really going to accelerate.”

Acumatica provides a “very customizable” ERP offering that allows partners to reflect the specific business needs of their clients, Roskill said.

“With Acumatica 6, we’re really extending what I believe is already an industry-leading mobile capability,” he said. “We’re now allowing our partners to very easily extend their client’s customer solutions to mobile devices, to Apple iOS or Android devices specifically. So there’s a great partner opportunity presented there.”

Acumatica has 350 partners globally, including a mix of resellers and ISVs, Roskill said.

“To sell an ERP product, you typically need …

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… three or four add-ons to meet the needs of whatever is going on with that particular customer,” he said. “And that could be an add-on for sales tax calculation, a point-of-sale component or it could be a warehouse management system. So we’ve got an Acumatica ISV portfolio of about 85 ISVs that have written these various add-ons for Acumatica to fill it out as a product. We also have a set of ISVs that are effectively verticalizing Acumatica. So they’re taking Acumatica to market in spaces like the federal government or hotel management.”

Cloud ERP is particularly useful for business with remote employees, Roskill said. Acumatica’s top customer segments include professional and business services, eCommerce retail operations, manufacturing and wholesale distribution, he said.

“If you’re not working with a modern cloud application, it means that everybody’s got to log into the system with a VPN and some sort of terminal services application, and half the time those things don’t work and it takes a bunch of extra time,” he said. “Whereas if you’re working in a true cloud offering, none of that overhead happens. You just basically get right in from a browser and you log in, and you’re going.”