As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
The Unit4 product team gave me a sneak preview of their ERPx product being showcased today at their virtual customer event, X4U.
I have excerpted about 30 minutes in the video below from the 75 minute briefing.
Matthias Thurner, Chief Product Officer kicks it off with a corporate overview, the people centric industries and geographies Unit4 focuses on
At 9:26, Dmitri Krakowsky, ex-Google who has been advising Unit4 on future product directions, runs through some of the ERPx design principles. They leverage the Microsoft stack and reflect contemporary thinking like easy communication with the digital assistant Wanda which interacts via Slack, Teams or Skype instead of traditional e-mail.
I also liked his modesty - it has a realistic acknowledgement that for most customers today ERP represents Enterprise with a small e - it only delivers 25% or so of the total wall to wall functionality they need.
At 21.32, Dimitri runs through a quick demo of Smart Invoices and the Extension Kit
At 26.10, Claus Jepsen, Chief Technology Officer and Dimitri go through some of the architectural and functional components and availability of ERPx.
I found it a very crisp briefing. I am sure as a result of X4U plenty of customers will want to learn much more. And I am sure analysts will have questions about migrations, feature parity across releases, hyperscalers beyond Microsoft.
According to Unit4:
"New capabilities will now be developed in cloud. This enables us to make use of the Microsoft Azure technology stack for building, testing, deploying, and managing our ERP and additional cloud services.
The benefit of releasing capabilities via cloud is that they will not affect our customer’s ERP core installation, significantly reducing the impact of onboarding new functionality.
New capabilities can be made available for ERP 7 if specific features are deemed necessary or of particular interest for our on-premise customers."
Look forward to more conversations with them.
