Interview with Robert Reid, President and CEO of Intacct
13 December 2011 - We asked Robert Reid, President and CEO of Intacct, a few questions about his company and his view of the markets they serve.
Robert Reid
President and CEO
GETAPP.COM: Who are you and what is your role in the company?
REID: I am the President and CEO.
GETAPP.COM: Can you briefly present your management team?
Intacct has a veteran team of executives that have a wide range of experience. Here is a rundown of our team:
Aaron Harris – Chief Technology Officer
Aaron has nearly 20 years of high-tech engineering experience in the areas of business applications and software development strategies. In his role as CTO for Intacct, Aaron is responsible for the company's product vision and technology direction. Aaron has been with Intacct since its inception – starting as the company's chief engineer and for the past several years serving as CTO and vice president of engineering
Dan Miller – Vice President of Product Management
Dan brings Intacct more than 20 years of product management, product design, and engineering experience in Financial Management. Dan leads the product management and user experience teams. Prior to Intacct, Dan had a long career with Intuit, creating products for small and mid-size businesses.
Haris Hadjiioannou - Vice President, Operations
Haris provides information technology leadership across all Intacct services. He is responsible for technology infrastructure, architecture, security, networks and service operations. Haris’ team is responsible for maintaining Intacct’s industry-leading uptime track-record.
Kathleen Lord – Vice President, Sales
Kathy is responsible for overseeing Intacct's direct sales activities and operations. She brings to Intacct more than 15 years of sales management experience at startups and major software companies.
Taylor Macdonald - Vice President of Channels
Taylor is responsible for managing Intacct's successful Value Added Reseller (VAR) and CPA channel initiatives. Taylor brings to Intacct more than 20 years of experience building and operating some of the world's largest and most successful channel programs at leading financial management and ERP providers including Deltek and Sage.
Daniel Druker – Senior Vice President, Marketing and Business Development
Dan joined Intacct in 2007 and brings more than 25 years of executive, strategy and operational excellence to Intacct. Dan’s prior experience includes time at Arbor Software, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Intel and Postini.
Marc Linden - Chief Financial Officer & Vice President, Finance and Administration
Marc oversees the company's financial and administrative organizations. Marc brings Intacct more than 20 years of finance, business strategy, and general management experience.
GETAPP.COM: Are you a cloud or a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company?
REID: : Intacct is a market and technology leader in cloud-based financial management and accounting applications for small businesses, emerging enterprises, mid-sized organizations, multi-location businesses, public companies, multi-national corporations and CPA firms. As a cloud provider our philosophy is to create award winning software and deliver stellar service to our customers.
GETAPP.COM: What are the points of difference of your solutions?
REID: Being a leader in cloud financial management and accounting applications means having a deep and mature system that helps finance teams work more efficiently and productively. We believe several aspects make our financial management software applications stand out from the crowd, including:
* Get Started Quickly with Intacct — a hallmark of Intacct is that it is easy to deploy and easy to use. Intacct includes built-in best practices from successful implementations. We can be prescriptive or consultative, based on what works best for you. Our fixed-price implementation packages also mean that we are confident in getting a company up and running because of the thousands of companies that are currently using us successfully.
* Superior financial management and accounting applications — our award winning financial management applications are deep and mature. They support business process flexibility, advanced functionality like multi-currency financial consolidation as well as governance and compliance, all in a package that is easy to use and deploy.
* Business visibility, insight and understanding — we have built our financial management software applications to drive meaningful, real-time information for actionable insight across the business – including financial, non-financial and operational data.
* Open, best of breed choices — Intacct believes that all stakeholders at a company should work with applications that best meet their needs. We make it easy for our customers to extend the value of Intacct by leveraging vendor supported integrations with other best of breed applications.
* Cloud accounting applications — The cloud offers compelling economics when you compare it to traditional on-premises software. On-premises software requires costs to purchase the financial applications and any underlying infrastructure software, plus hardware, installation, implementation, integration, operations, maintenance, upgrades, training and administration. With Intacct, there is no software or hardware to buy, install or program to meet your needs. Intacct is easy to deploy through configuration, without customization or programming. We also include free US-based support and free online training, all for an affordable and predictable subscription fee.
* Client success and satisfaction — we pride ourselves in the success of our customers. With traditional client-server business applications, Gartner and others report that as many as 70% of implementations fail to meet their objectives. With Intacct cloud financial applications, more than 95% of our clients succeed in going live within three months of subscribing to our service. Because Intacct is a subscription service, our clients vote with their wallets — and every year more than 95% of our clients renew their subscriptions. The vast majority of client that don’t renew are companies that have either been acquired or gone out of business.
* Lower your total cost of ownership plus achieve a high ROI — our cloud accounting delivery model is designed to help you reduce overhead and ongoing operational costs. With Intacct cloud financial applications, there are no capital costs, no operating costs, no hardware or software to install or maintain, no programming, easy upgrades and low administrative cost. Intacct lets you focus on your core business while we handle all the IT details. Many of our customer’s are achieving between a 100 and 200% ROI each year from Intacct, because of the improved automated processes that allow them to forgo hiring more people.
GETAPP.COM: How would you like to be evaluated by a prospect?
REID: We want our prospects to do a thorough evaluation. They should certainly focus on the same types of things they would normally evaluate with any software system – product fit, implementation success and support quality. However, with cloud-based systems, it is also important to look at things like operational track record, infrastructure and security, ongoing business practices and culture, as well as expected ROI/TCO. Look carefully at Service Level Agreements – for example, Intacct offers a comprehensive “Buy with Confidence” guarantee that establishes with full transparency the level of service you can expect from us.
GETAPP.COM: Why do your customers buy from you?
REID: Customers select Intacct for many reasons. When you're evaluating new accounting and financial management systems, you want a solution that fits your needs now and into the future – Intacct fits that mold. We offer deep and mature functionality that provides companies with real-time business visibility, improved automated processes, strong financial controls, a lower total cost of ownership and outstanding return on their investment.
GETAPP.COM: Can you mention some of key clients?
REID: Intacct considers all its customers “key clients.” Our applications are used by more than 5000 businesses, from startups to public companies. As a cloud-based system, we have to continually impress all our clients to retain them each year and we take customer satisfaction very serious. The majority of our customers are growth oriented firms looking to scale without having to add more headcount to support the growth.
GETAPP.COM: What do you see as the key trend emerging in the industry?
REID: I think one of the key emerging trends is business leaders focusing more on creating business value. Top executives are putting in place systems that not only keep track of their business from a financial standpoint, but also give them the insight to understand the operational KPIs that will help everyone in the company spot opportunities to exploit and potential brewing issues to resolve. Cloud computing helps eliminate friction between systems and people, allowing employees to be more productive by having access to all the information needed to make decisions and taking the right actions.
GETAPP.COM: What is THE most important message you feel you should get across to someone considering buying your solutions?
REID: : Buying a financial solution is not just about checking out can the software help me with my current needs to improve financial visibility, efficiency, etc., but also can the system meet my needs as we grow in the future. The financial system of record is the most important system you will be procuring, and you should be selecting a vendor that is focused on your needs and will invest in that area for the future. You need a true business partner, and the responsiveness and the way a vendor approaches customer service is as important as application functionality. This is a long-term relationship; make sure other customers have had a great experience with the company. It’s not just about the current features, it’s about a focus on your continuing success – and it is easy today to understand the sentiment of other customers through web perceptions of a Cloud company’s responsiveness and service.
GETAPP.COM: Thanks for your time, Rob.