Is “Horizontal” Accounting Software Dead?

Accounting Software blogger Chris Thorman has a new article up exploring trends towards a decline in demand for horizontal accounting software.  There's little doubt that medium sized and large enterprises are looking for integrated solutions (often industry specific vertical solutions) and that the days of selling standalone, horizontal accounting solutions are winding down.

Dynamics GP does a great job of filling most of the needs of medium sized and large enterprises across most industries.

GP delivers functionality to create an integrated, enterprise wide footprint across you organization; Accounting, Distribution, Manufacturing, Project Accounting, Retail Management, and Field Service Management are just a few of the integrated solutions available from Dynamics GP.

It is easily designed, tailored. and/or customized through the implementation process to meet the specific needs of individual companies, functional departments, and even users.  This value added service does not have to break the budget for an implementation.  Given the pricing model for GP and the relative ease of implementation the ROI for a Dynamics GP implementation is very attractive to executives and stakeholders.

Microsoft is pushing partners to focus on developing industry specific, vertical expertise more and more and rewarding them for it.  The ISV channel is producing great vertical solutions for GP at a rapid pace.  I don't think there's any doubt that horizontal accounting software is on the decline.  We're not selling or implementing accounting software anymore.  For many of us, it's dead already.

Dexterity and IntelliSense: Who says nothing is impossible?

The Dynamics GP Blogster is passionately taking on the challenge to get IntelliSense implemented in Dexterity.  When I made the statement to him that the likelihood that this would ever happen is ridiculously low his response to me was inspiring; "Good inventions were never right the first time around, they took several tries and awareness".

I voted for this feature.  If you want to get everything you can get out of GP you should vote for it too.  Go vote today at http://connect.microsoft.com/!