UPDATE – February 23, 2015 – Acumatica is now also available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an AWS Test Drive (click here). If you check out the link, you’ll see that AWS Test Drive is a pretty exclusive club and it’s really cool that Acumatica is a part of it.
Are you considering Acumatica for your next ERP system? You can try out a fully functional Acumatica demo environment by going to:
TryAcumatica.com
You don’t even need to fill out any kind of “please contact me” form or provide any information. The link above takes you directly to an Acumatica ERP login page.
Just use the following credentials to login:
My Username: admin
My Password: 123
This is a rare and bold move by Acumatica in my opinion. I don’t know of many ERP vendors in the market that allow you to test drive their product so easily. Most ERP vendors require you to jump through a few hoops in the sales cycle before you can even see what the product looks like.
I have two theories for why Acumatica is willing to do this:
1. Browser-based technology
Acumatica was developed from the ground up as a browser-based ERP application. All someone needs is a web browser in order to securely try out Acumatica. Older ERP products are designed to be deployed internally and there are a lot of security holes if you open them up to the public. They just weren’t designed at the core for public deployment. This is why creating a vendor or customer portal is such a major development effort with many older ERP products.
With Acumatica it’s very easy to spin up a public environment because the entire application, down to its core, was designed for public deployment. In addition, since users don’t need anything more than a web browser to interact with Acumatica, you can simply click one of the above links and start using Acumatica in a matter of seconds.
2. The product speaks for itself
Another reason why other ERP systems don’t allow such easy access to a demo environment is that their products aren’t as impressive as Acumatica. The Acumatica product was built on modern technology and has an impressive array of features which speak for themselves. If you get your own hands on the Acumatica product, I think you’ll find that it does its own marketing.
Many of the features that you see in demos with older ERP products don’t work so well in real-time. Many times the demos that you see are a lot of “smoke and mirrors” to make it appear that something is happening easily when actually the details behind the scenes are a lot messier than they appear. So, understandably, most ERP vendors don’t want you to “kick the tires” of their products because you will be able to discover the truth behind some of the features.
With Acumatica, the product works very well. It’s fast, clean, and obviously built on modern technology. All you have to do is take it for a test drive to realize this.
Disclaimer
Of course, there is a big disclaimer here. There is a reason why Acumatica sells exclusively through local implementation consulting partners. ERP implementations can be very complicated, with many non-technology issues to consider. The success or failure of an ERP implementation depends more on the implementation people than it does the technology. So you would never want to buy Acumatica without first talking to an experienced implementation consultant.
Even so, it’s still nice to be able to try before you buy.