Acumatica Summit 2019 Day Two
Jon Roskill, Acumatica’s CEO, started off Day Two focusing on Acumatica’s R&D initiatives, which can be carried out by the fact that 74% of all employees work in R&D. This focus is what makes Acumatica a fun company to partner with and the day was filled with a look at near and not too distant future.
Acumatica Summit 2019 Day One Recap
For those lucky enough to attend in person and pick up a stainless steel tumbler from Miir or a tasty dessert from Nothing Bundt Cakes, two Acumatica customers, attendees also got to see some exciting new features coming in Acumatica 2019 R1.
Dynamics SL Year End Updates for 2018
Microsoft has released the year end updates for the 2018 tax year for Dynamics SL. They include changes for 1099 and W-2 reporting to help comply for 2018 tax year regulations.
Dynamics SL 2018 CU1 Released
Microsoft has released Dynamics SL 2018 Cumulative Update 1 (CU1) and it is now available for download. Below is a summary of some of the enhancements:
Dynamics SL 2018 Is Now Available
On May 1st, Microsoft released Dynamics SL 2018 which includes new features, updates and fixes. In addition, SL 2018 will integrate with Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft Power Apps and Microsoft Flow. There are also new Web Apps available and Microsoft is planning on releasing Web App updates about once a month. They will also start releasing updates quarterly to the Dynamics SL application. We will highlight some of the updates here with more details to follow in upcoming posts.
Say hello to Polaris Hosting!
Effective October 2017, Polaris has launched a hosting service for companies (and Polaris customers, of course!) seeking to run their ERP, accounting, or other business-critical software on a cloud-based platform. The hosting service – which is an alternative to businesses running and maintaining their own servers – offers advantages like improved security, improved reliability, increased server performance, and cost-savings. The new offering is a logical extension of our company’s core business of developing, deploying, maintaining, and troubleshooting software solutions from Microsoft Dynamics SL and Acumatica.
“We’ve been helping a wide range of clients manage their Dynamics SL- and Acumatica-based ERP, accounting, and other business software for over 10 years now, almost exclusively on their own servers or in homegrown data centers,” says our founder and president, Todd Delaney. “While there’s nothing inherently wrong with taking a DIY approach to running things on your own box, there can be considerable advantages to moving to the cloud. So, we’re excited to offer that as an option — and a broader service offering of both software and robust, remote servers to run it on.”
In launching Polaris Hosting, we’ve identified and expanded on three key benefits to businesses currently managing their own servers:
- Lower “IT” costs – Information technology is oftentimes not a core competency of many businesses. By moving software and server management outside, businesses can reduce their “IT” costs or render them more predictable, eliminate headaches, and focus on their mainline business.
- Scalability – Especially for smaller or growing businesses, needed server capacity, bandwidth, and speed can fluctuate and evolve, making it difficult (and costly) to predict and purchase the right hardware. By ‘leasing’ space in the cloud, servers can be added (or even scaled back) to stay in step with demand, web traffic, or common business fluctuations; companies reduce the risk of purchasing and maintaining equipment that can quickly become obsolete; and, with Polaris Hosting, customers can establish a ‘hybrid’ approach of in-house and cloud-based servers to migrate to the cloud gradually – or choose between a privately held or “public” server farm (such as Amazon or Microsoft Azure).
- Superior security – In the face of ever-evolving security environment, Polaris’ hosting service increases confidence, thanks to added protection, automatic server software updates (no need to track and manage updates, patches, and upgrades in-house), robust back-up power, and well-defined/documented disaster recovery.
Current and prospective Polaris customers interested in learning more about the hosting services now available from Polaris Business Solutions can initiate a no-cost server audit, consultation, and estimate with a simple email.
Acumatica 6.1 Now Available
In January, Acumatica has released the latest version – 6.1 It includes several new enhancements and bug fixes. Some of the enhancements are detailed below:
Acumatica 6 to Include Outlook Add-In
Acumatica’s Customer Management (CRM) suite has always been able to provide users with a complete view of their business. As part of a full suite of integrated business management applications (ERP), users can easily share information between marketing, sales, service and finance because the data all exists in one database. With the upcoming release Acumatica CRM has just gotten even better.
Why Acumatica Makes Even More Sense After the NetSuite Acquisition Announcement
On July 28th Oracle announced plans to acquire NetSuite for $9.3 billion in cash. This didn’t come as a complete surprise as Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chairman, is the single largest shareholder of NetSuite and Oracle is aggressively trying to increase their cloud-based revenue. For NetSuite, a merger, in theory, could make sense for a company that has never made a GAAP profit in any quarter or year in its existence, and according to their last 10-k filing “may not achieve profitability in the future“.
Acumatica Releases Version 5.3
Acumatica unveiled the newest version of their cloud-based accounting and ERP software at their annual Summit for partner and customers. The new features in Acumatica 5.3 is focused on increasing the performance, stability and mobility of Acumatica 5.0, a full ERP suite that includes financials, distribution, account and CRM.