Unit4 got well and truly on board with what it describes as the “mega trends” (social, mobile, analytics and cloud - SMAC) at its strategy kick-off event a few days ago in Amsterdam, underlining its commitment with the latest release of the Agresso ERP suite, Milestone 4. As well as being chock full of the new technologies, it represents Unit4’s latest move to rearchitect ERP for the modern age.
Unit4's positioning is that its Vita architecture makes it easy for companies to adapt their ERP systems post-implementation, making it easier for them to adapt to business change (its tag line is Business Living in Change – BLINC). That approach, combined with the four major technology trends that are behind most of the activity in the SITS market, plus lower upfront and cost of ownership credentials than the likes of SAP and Oracle, means its message is falling on increasingly receptive ground. It continues to win business - one of its latest UK wins is a £3m contract with the University of Bristol which is a significant deal for the company.
The commitment to SMAC is not particularly different to other vendors, the difference may be in how it is executed. The secret sauce could be cloud pure-play FinancialForce, the Unit4/Salesforce.com joint venture. If it can infuse Agresso and Unit4 with cloud principles it will help transform the business – and more smoothly and rapidly than it happening at SAP for example. Both the Agresso and FinancialForce teams were at the strategy event, indicating that FinancialForce is core to the business, not an add-on.
Unit4 is well established but not well known and that is one of the things CEO Jose Duarte wants to change in short order. Part of this includes a greater emphasis on working with partners, something it is has done opportunistically rather than strategically in the past. Interestingly, it is not targeting traditional large SI’s but specialist and local partners. This part of the strategy needs a lot of work but could be another specialist ingredient in the Unit4 mix. Once the question of its ownership is resolved (see here), it can really start to push forward, put more pressure on the likes of SAP and Oracle and see how it stacks up against the cloud pure-plays.