Acumatica, the Seattle-area maker of cloud-based business management software, is out with what it calls the first ever business application skill for Alexa for Business as well as new tie-ins with products from Microsoft, Google, Tableau Software and more.
The new Acumatica Alexa skill lets customers do a variety of things via voice command, including checking inventory, looking up and approving expenses and updating opportunities in customer relationship management tools. These are exactly the kinds of scenarios Amazon imagined when it announced Alexa for Business in November 2017, bringing the digital brain to everywhere from the boardroom to the factory floor.
Acumatica has been working with Amazon on an Alexa skill for years. The new skill was announced at the Acumatica Summit this week. The company also announced tie-ins with offerings from other big tech companies.
- Acumatica Cloud ERP Connector for Microsoft Flow — Microsoft’s automation tool — lets employees streamline tasks across apps sync files, get notifications, collect data and more, without help from developers.
- An integration with a new beta program from Google called Cloud Vision Product Search makes it easier to look up items.
- Tableau’s suit of data analytics tools will be integrated with Acumatica’s software, adding another layer of knowledge to the reporting and dashboard offerings from Acumatica.
Last summer Acumatica raised $25 million to boost its headcount and step up its challenge to rivals such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Sage and others in the market for cloud-based enterprise resource management and financial software. At the time, the company said it planned to expand headcount in the next year by about 40 percent, or as many as 100 employees.
Last summer, the company said it had about 250 employees, and about 40 at its Bellevue, Wash. headquarters. Today, Acumatica has a similar headcount, employing more than 250 people total, including 50 in the Seattle area.
The privately held company doesn’t disclose financial results, but it did say that revenue grew 98 percent in 2018, following 100 percent revenue growth in 2017.
Acumatica uses Amazon Web Services for its public cloud offering and offers customers the ability to run its software on-site or in their own data centers. The company was founded in 2008 by John Howell, Mike Chtchelkonogov, and Serguei Beloussov, who also founded companies including Parallels and Acronis. Today it is run by CEO Jon Roskill, who previously oversaw Microsoft’s worldwide partner organization.
