I was part of the Gartner team which popularized the ERP concept in the late 90s. Nearly three decades later, I am impatient and always asking vendors about vertical extensions, localization for a long list of countries, automation in implementations and support and increasingly about their AI applications.
The reality, of course, is many customers only want core ERP functionality at low effort and cost. They have "ring fenced" core ERP with other applications, they have custom developed other applications, many are not particularly global, others do not want multiple hyperscaler clouds. I hear from many of them – thank you, but we want our ERP to follow the KISS motto – Keep it Simple, Stupid! Insulate our customizations, make upgrades as easy as I am used to on my mobile device, don’t require us to hire school buses of consultants.
We have a challenge in our industry – vendors glibly call it "technical debt" and blame customers for not keeping up with their latest offerings. If it was a handful of customers, you could buy that argument. Tens of thousands of customers point to a big problem in the industry. I will explain that further in another post, but I thought Unit4 in its recent X4U customer event started to tackle the challenge in their customer base. You can watch the 2 hour session replay here.
In fairness, Unit4 is focused on a handful of service industries (especially project-centric ones), only in key global markets and mostly on mid-sized enterprises so the customer and related product complexity is somewhat easier to manage. There was the mandatory talk of verticals and Generative AI and a slick gaming metaphor of "power-up" but I was more impressed with how much focus went into convincing customers the move to the cloud need not be a high-risk surgery.
My favorite section was that by Jean de Villiers, CCO on Success4U starting around 1.17.50 – “one point of access to everything in the service portfolio. Whether those services are partner capabilities that we bring to bear through our Success Catalog, whether they are white glove cloud operations services that enhance your usage of your SaaS platform, whether they are an extended support SLA that helps you to be properly supported in your time zone, and enhanced professional services that can assist you with driving organizational and cultural change across your organization.” Its not a new idea but I like how it is packaged – indeed they describe it as a “wrapper” with various “success packages”, milestones and service levels.
I liked that they gave half an hour to Rachel Jordan, VP of Product starting around 46.15. She had plenty of time to go through multiple demos across 3 pillars focusing on decision velocity, automation, and integration across the financials, hcm and projects components of the suite. The demos covered Open Banking, expense reports, revenue recognition and other use cases.
Couple of things to me highlighted how grounded the event was
- I was impressed how few slides CEO, Mike Ettling used in his opening monologue and in the exec Q&A at end. The customer exec he had on stage, Michel Etienne of Foyer Health, used more slides than he did.
- Good friend, Ray Wang who is usually a wild man on stage was tethered to a desk as he presented virtually.
More on the industry challenge I pointed above in a future note. In the meantime, I look forward to Unit4’s execution on the sensible stuff they presented.
