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Outgrown QuickBooks/Peachtree? Microsoft Dynamics GP offers scalability, affordability & functionality. Learn more here

Become a dynamic business with Microsoft Dynamics GP and learn why a move to Microsoft Dynamics GP is a smart move from QuickBooks and Peachtree.

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Linda and I will be joined by two of our hosting customers at Convergence to present, “Ask the Experts:  Travel to the “ERP Cloud” and find out if it is right for you.”  It is part of the DayONE GPUG series.

These are the specifics:

Session:  UBGP19

Room:  A311

Time:  Sunday, April 10, 4:45

More information on GPUG DayONE session.

This session will be held in the Georgia World Congress Center; the same venue for Convergence 2011.  If you’re going to be at Convergence, drop by our booth in the Expo.

We have family office clients who have found Dynamics GPO to be a good fit for their organizations.  Family offices often have competing interests that make it difficult to determine which accounting system would suit the organization best:

• Need to track and manage the accounting for many different types of enterprises; operations, equity, personal
• Need to keep the information secure
• Need to provide high quality financial reporting to owners
• Need to keep it very affordable

Dynamics GP in a hosted environment provides a solution for these competing interests.  The wide variety of functionality available in Dynamics GP means that a family office can track businesses with significant operations, financial holdings, real estate holdings, and personal activities.  The solid financial reporting functionality of FRx and Management Reporter means that a family office can easily provide a variety of different reporting formats to meet the owners’ needs.  The availability of subscription pricing in a hosted environment makes Dynamics GP a very affordable system, from the beginning, because there is no significant upfront licensing fees or hardware purchases required.  Hosting Dynamics GP in a tier-1 hosting environment means that the family office will have dependable and secure access to the system.  Regular data backups, redundant hardware, and a high level of physical security means that the Dynamics GP system will be secure.

If you’re looking for a solid solution for your family office, consider Dynamics GP in a hosted environment.

Hosting complex ERP systems is not an easy thing to do.  Whether you host your ERP system on premise or off site, there’s a lot to do to maintain connectivity, system performance, and provide good security and data backup.  To do all of these things well, you have to know the ERP application very well.

Consider this:

• If the system engineer doesn’t know the application well, the chance that the correct data backups will not be done, the wrong service pack will be applied, etc., goes up significantly.
• If an end user is experiencing a system problem, and the system engineer doesn’t know the system well, the time to resolve the problem increases dramatically.
• If the ERP application is not available because of some unrelated technical issue, infrastructure software problems, loss of power, or network disruption, productivity decreases because the system is not available to use.

These are fairly common issues people experience with their ERP systems.  If you’re considering hosting your ERP application off-site, consider strongly a hosting company that knows the applications well; not someone that’s just running a bunch of machines.

Anya Ciecierski of CAL Business Solutions discovers convincing evidence at WPC.

“A worn-out unfounded rumor that some competitors use to inspire doubt in Dynamics ERP buyers has been; “Microsoft owns 4 ERP products now, is Dynamics GP going away?”  The answer is NO.  I am at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference this week, meeting with the managers who make those decisions. And the answer is clear – Microsoft Dynamics GP is here to stay.  No question. And if there was ever any doubt about the popularity of Dynamics GP all you have to do is look at the statistics for June 2010.  Last month, June 2010, more customers bought Microsoft Dynamics GP in just ONE WEEK than in the whole month of June 2009. In fact, twice as many.  This was the largest customer add month in GP history.”

The full article is here.

In the ERP space some software developers are changing the way they license their products. The change is from an up-front charge for a perpetual license, to a periodic charge for a periodic license.

This change is powered by the following changes in the market:

• Software-as-a-Service providers typically sell their licenses on a periodic basis; either monthly or annually
• Current economic conditions make lower up-front costs attractive to users

This change in the way that users perceive they can purchase software licenses is putting pressure on all software developers to provide a periodic license option.

These are reasons why software developers might resist offering a periodic licensing option:

• Getting the license fee all up front is considered better than receiving a stream of revenue over time
• Periodic billing adds administrative complexity
• Control over license usage is difficult or impossible

Let me suggest why software developers should offer a periodic license option:

• The preference for periodic licensing is growing, and if software developers want to appeal to a growing number of users, they will want to find a way to provide this option
• Their competitors are doing it
• Generally in business a stream of revenue is preferable to a lump sum, because it allows the business to better plan their operations
• Concerns over protecting software developers’ intellectual property are mitigated when a third party hosting company is involved to administer license usage, user invoicing, and collections

To help move to offering a periodic license option, I have suggested to software developers that they conceptually separate the consulting, customization, and implementation fees from the software license. It’s reasonable that the consulting, customization, and implementation fees be invoiced up front or as they are delivered, since the costs for these services to the developer are generally incurred for specific implementations and during the period of the implementation. The value received by the user for using software is generally realized over a period of time, and generally represents no additional costs to the developer. The developer is merely receiving a royalty for the substantial investment they have made in developing software. It makes sense that the user is invoiced in conjunction with the value they receive from using the software.

The change is taking place. If you’re a software developer, do you want to participate?

Please help us to understand your current experience with Dynamics ERP Hosting.

This survey should take less than five minutes and you will have an opportunity to win a $500 American Express gift card.

The winner will be drawn at the completion of Convergence, April 27th.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/T63H88Z

The next major release of GP will be Dynamics GP 2010.  Microsoft continues to design and deliver the product to be easier to use and to be a more effective business tool for getting things done and reporting results.

There are a number of functionality enhancements and richer connections with Microsoft Office and other Microsoft technologies.

We are presenting a sneak peek of the new version on March 24th.  Check out the details here.

This is an easy way to review the new release, so I expect you to be on-line with us on the 24th, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm PDT.

Go straight to the Click to Attend site here.

There will be a short discussion of CustomerSource immediately following, at 12:00pm.  Are you using CustomerSource?