Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Rob Reid, EVP of Sage Intacct (Part 1)

Rob was the CEO of Intacct, which Sage has acquired. Intacct is a leader in small business ERP. Read on to learn more about the trends in that space.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Sage Intacct.

Rob Reid: Sage Intacct is an ERP solution provider for the midmarket. We have been an innovation leader for the last 10 years and also a customer satisfaction leader in the industry eclipsing all others. It’s pretty interesting. We moved to being a cloud solution as an industry. The industry used to be called SaaS.

We deliver the best technology we possibly can as well as provide white-glove service so that your customers maximize their success and get the most out of it. The company has been growing anywhere between 35% and 45% now for eight or nine years. What we really have tried to do is make sure that people are able to get real-time information and to use that empirical data to run their business a lot better than they’d be able to without having a cloud ERP solution like Sage Intacct.

The old ERP solutions used to be good at recording historical information. Now with cloud solutions, you can see your opportunities and threats immediately and take action to be able to improve your business. Most people today will go forward to make the business more efficient within finance and accounting. Then they find out that they‘ve got this competitive weapon that allows them to really do a great job.

We think we’ve moved from being the system of record to being the system of intelligence for our customers. I’m the consummate entrepreneur. I’ve been in technology for 40 years. I’ve done eight companies and have gone through three IPOs. I’ve sold four companies with a very high return for our investors – anywhere between 7x and 10x. One of the things I’m most proud of is that, here at Sage Intacct, we’ve been rated for eight years as the best place in the midmarket to work in Silicon Valley. We’re right there on the top of taking care of employees and taking care of customers.

Sramana Mitra: Wonderful. I’d like to begin by having you give our audience a bit of an ecosystem segmentation of where exactly do you position Sage Intacct in the ERP universe. From your point of view, where is Intuit? Where is NetSuite? Where is Oracle?

Rob Reid: The ERP segment is the largest business application segment within technology. If you eliminate the consumer side and just look at business, this is the largest and the oldest. It’s the reason why companies started using computers in the first place – to keep track of their revenues.

Because it is the largest with a $32 billion potential, it is also very fragmented. We like to always look at things from a customer viewpoint. If you think about very small businesses, these are typically one to 20 employees. That’s the purview of our friends over at Intuit and in QuickBooks. They dominate that arena. They just do a great job of digital interaction with their customers and deliver high-quality, easy-to-use solutions.

When companies start growing, they need more processes. They also have requirements about going on in and getting a bank loan and getting investments from friends and family or from venture capitalists. They need to have more structure than what’s provided from a QuickBooks perspective. They also need more automation to be able to grow the business. That’s when they’ll look at a midmarket solution like Sage Intacct.

We’re above Intuit’s QuickBooks and we provide a gap solution to those customers. The investors know that those are really good numbers that are coming out. Our direct competitor is NetSuite. They’re going after that same segment. We also have Financial Forest as another competitor there in the midmarket.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Rob Reid, EVP of Sage Intacct
1 2 3 4 5 6