Intacct: The Postmodern ERP

The First Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financials

Gartner has released its first-ever Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financials and Intacct has placed strongly among some big players and household names in the business, beating out Microsoft, FinancialForce and Epicor among others.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant (MQ) reports have been used for decades to break down complicated tech product markets on measures of completeness of vision and ability to execute into an easy-to-grok map of the key players’ relative positions across four quadrants:

  • Leaders

  • Challengers

  • Visionaries

  • Niche Players

For that reason, it’s been a valued tool of decision makers when investing in enterprise applications, but Gartner has not believed there was justification to create an MQ specific to cloud financial applications, until recently.

The big ERP and core financials markets weren’t going anywhere in recent years, and customers who had already made big investments in their ERP weren’t looking for an upgrade. But with a recently released report, Gartner has for the first time dropped a Magic Quadrant for cloud core financial applications. The timing seems perfect.

“Over the last 12 to 18 months, cloud core financial management suites have matured to such an extent that they have disrupted this static market,” Gartner says in the report. “This reflects the increasing prevalence of postmodern ERP strategies.” As Gartner’s report defines it, postmodern ERP is the deconstruction of suite-centric, monolithic, on-premises ERP deployments into smaller-footprint applications that are integrated as needed.

Intacct Ranked as a Visionary

In this brave new postmodern ERP world, Intacct has emerged as a Visionary in Gartner’s first cloud financials assessment. “Intacct is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant due to its cloud commitment, focus on financial functionality and marketing initiatives for finance,” says the report. “Intacct offers a scalable and functional core financial system with good flexibility and functionality in GL and analytics.”

The Gartner analysts thought that Intacct was in a particularly good position as the ERP market continues to be disrupted. “It is well-aligned to Gartner’'s vision of postmodern ERP, with a wide range of APIs and a focus on financial management applications that can work in a loosely coupled manner with other cloud services,” the authors noted.

Intacct’s leadership in the technology that underpins these systems also helped their Visionary ranking. “Intacct has a strong vision to use cloud and new technology to support finance process improvement. This includes using AI to eliminate the financial close, enabling continuous auditing and leveraging in-memory computing for embedded financial and performance analytics.”

Land of the Giants

Only two massive publicly traded companies, Workday and Oracle, with market caps of $20.5 billion and nearly $210 billion, respectively, exceeded Intacct for ability to execute. These companies ranked mostly because of their global presence and enormous financial resources.

More surprising was that SAP, one of the longstanding behemoths of global ERP, was relegated to the Niche Players quadrant, an unfamiliar place for them. This, according to the report’s authors, was because SAP’s primary cloud product, BusinessByDesign, is overshadowed by other SAP products and its suite-centric solution does not really fit Gartner’s postmodern ERP model.

Similarly, Oracle NetSuite placed in the Challengers quadrant because its suite-only approach is not friendly to a best-of-breed ERP strategy and because although it has the resources of Oracle since being acquired, it also is competing with its own adopted family.

Economy of Scale

To be considered this MQ, vendors need to be serving midsize, large, and global customers. This means they need to have at least 100 customers using the cloud core financials to process a minimum of $50 million each in revenue per year. For that reason, small business cloud accounting systems such as those from Intuit or Xero are not included.

Of all the vendors who placed anywhere in this new Magic Quadrant, only Intacct has a true ability to scale all the way from a single-user start-up to a billion-dollar public company, thanks to its reseller channel strategies.

At the top end, Intacct customers are blowing away those of some of the other software vendors:

  • A top services firm with more than 3,000 users

  • An influential nonprofit consolidating 660 entities

  • A top software-as-a-service company with more than 250,000 transactions per hour

To learn more about the first-ever Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financials, you can download a copy of the report here.

View a demo of Intacct or sign up for a trial company here.

 

 

Tom Achor