The exhibition hall seemed roughly the size of a Costco. There were a dozen or so lunch buffets to feed the town-size crowd sitting down at the round tables. Every time I walk into one of these conference lunches I’m not sure where to sit, and with a record 3,800 people attending the Sage Intacct Advantage conference at MGM in Las Vegas last week, I was a little more overwhelmed than usual.

Little did I know this lunch was actually going to be one of many productive highlights of the conference, bringing great ideas to customers, new tips for Revolution, and even a chance to talk one-on-one with the erstwhile Intacct CEO, while we both tried to gracefully eat the buffet chicken.

I spotted the controller from Revolution’s customer Powell’s Books sitting and chatting with Rob Reid, the CEO of Intacct prior to its acquisition by Sage and now, since this past May, the chairman of the Sage MidMarket Solutions group, which includes Intacct as well as Sage People.

I suddenly knew where I was going to be sitting for lunch. I happened to be wearing my Powell’s T-shirt that day, so clearly it was meant to happen. After I got my lunch and got seated, I told Rob it occurred to me that after a lot of people were worried two years ago about the impact on Intacct of being absorbed into Sage, it now looks more like Intacct is taking over Sage.

“Yeah, we’ve joked that it’s become a reverse takeover,” he said.

I mean, take a look at this year’s job changes: While Rob has moved from being at the helm of Intacct to overseeing its ongoing development along with Sage People, members of his Intacct executive team have also moved into positions of increasing responsibility at Sage. Most notably, former Intacct CTO Aaron Harris, one of the original developers of Intacct in the early days of cloud computing, is now the CTO of Sage. As in, all of it. Worldwide. Not only is the change not bad for Aaron, I think it’s good news for long-time Intacct customers and partners for reasons I’ll discuss in a minute.

Intacct’s past SVP Sales & Customer Success, Kathy Lord, is now the SVP in charge of the aforementioned Sage People, a cloud-based human-capital management solution that is in the process of being integrated with Intacct. And Marc Linden, the previous CFO of Intacct Corporation, is now EVP and general manager of the Sage Intacct unit.

The point is, these are all great moves that I find encouraging – Sage has a lot to learn from what Intacct has been doing, and it looks like they know that and are planning accordingly.

That lunch was one high point in a week that was a little hectic, in a good way. Revolution spent the entire week in Las Vegas, which for us means two days of Sage Intacct Partner Summit, followed by three days of Customer Conference.

It sounds like a fun time, and it is, but it’s also a marathon. The days are long and the conversations are important, so the week flies by!

Here are some of the highlights:

At the partner summit, Aaron Harris gave us his annual update on the scale at which some top-tier Sage Intacct customers are running:
- One customer has booked 603 million transactions (a 52 percent increase over the prior year).
- Another customer has 4.8 million time sheets posted (so far).
- Yet another has 2.9 million customers.
- And through all of this the response time on Intacct’s servers has dropped to 485 milliseconds, a reduction of 6 percent from last year.
Aaron also gave the general session some ideas of what his teams at Sage Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL) are coming up with for Intacct customers, like time sheets that almost fill themselves out, by going through email conversations and looking up calendar entries (c’mon, you know that’s how you fill out your time sheet!).
Kathy Lord led a Women in Finance panel discussion at Thursday’s general session, featuring Laura Wiler, Sage Intacct’s VP of Finance, and three customer leaders discussing the challenges they have faced and the opportunities they’ve found in their careers.

Therapy dogs worked two-hour shifts helping accountants cope with technology

There were more hands-on training sessions than ever. I took advantage of a two-hour workshop on Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning, a slick new application that we started working with in September. Although we already have one customer on this module, it has plenty of functionality for us to continue learning about.
The expo had a therapy dog visiting area so those of us who missed our mutts could get a little doggie time in between sessions. This is the best conference idea ever!

Artist and TED speaker Eric Wahl exhorted us in his keynote to rediscover our own creativity and unlock our potential. He also taught us that the smell of a box of crayons has been shown to reduce blood pressure by as much as 10 percent! Imagine the benefits if you sniffed Crayolas while petting therapy dogs.
And my favorite, I got to have dinner at Bellagio with finance leaders from three of our customers, Ruby Receptionists, Powell’s Books, and Phylos Bioscience, after which we had a pleasant walk back to the MGM. All the customers I talked with were glad they made the trip and said they had so much to take back to their companies, whether from talking directly with vendors at the expo or by learning more about the extended possibilities of Intacct Platform Services.

The next Sage Intacct Advantage conference will be in Orlando, Florida, October 12–16, 2020. If you’re considering new financial management software this year, put it on your calendar and ask us how we might help get your registration covered!

What Happens in Vegas is a Big Advantage