ISV Talks
ISV Talks
How GP365 is breathing new life into Microsoft's original business application
In this episode of ISV Talks, host Carol Livingston sits down with Jason Williams from The Atum Group, creators of GP365. Together, they explore how GP365 offers an affordable Azure hosting service tailored for Microsoft Dynamics GP users, alongside a convenient archive service for customers transitioning to a new ERP system. Discover why The Atum Group's expertise in Dynamics GP infrastructure makes them the ideal partner for cloud hosting.
👉 Learn more at www.gp365.ca
So welcome to this episode of ISV Talks. I'm Carol Livingston, the owner of Dynamics Connections and your host of ISV Talks, and on this episode I have Jason Williams, the CEO of GP365. Welcome, Jason. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Glad to be here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so tell us a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, I've been. I'm going to age myself here, but we're one of the first partners for Microsoft. Back in the day it was called Business Solutions, microsoft Business Solutions Partner. I want to say that was around 1999, maybe 2000, that we started our partnership with them, product of theirs, that it wasn't called Dynamics yet it was called Great Plains, and they had a division, I think, and we tried to figure out which one we fit best with sort of our culture and our knowledge and our background, and GP was the one that won. So we ended up forming a small group that was focused primarily on development around GP, but we also did implementation.
Speaker 2:So what is that? 25 years ago, so a very long time? Yeah, and we did that under the name of the Atom Corporation that's the name of the company and GP365 is the product. So that was formed in about 2018, when we sort of identified a gap in the marketplace for companies that had a GP server sitting in a closet somewhere or we're paying really exorbitant fees in a data center just to host it and we thought there has to be a better way. There has to be a better way.
Speaker 1:So we put our minds to develop the server in the back room that the nephew or somebody does updates to right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, or somebody trips over a wire and the whole system goes down. So we really focused on building a platform that would allow you to take it to the cloud, and that's what GP365 is.
Speaker 1:You know, it's kind of interesting. One thing I learned last year at the BizOps Partner Summit in Seattle was that GP was the original business application that Microsoft bought.
Speaker 2:So it was the OG of accounting and business applications for Microsoft.
Speaker 1:That was their entry was buying GP Of course, then after that, Nav and AX were purchased too, not long after.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I remember when we would get invoices in the early days from Microsoft. You could tell they were coming out of Dynamics GP. You could see the format and everything. So it was cool. It was cool.
Speaker 1:So tell us a little bit about the basic description of the solutions that you have for Dynamics GP.
Speaker 2:It's basically a cloud hosting option for GP. It's all in the Microsoft stack. So we didn't abandon Microsoft in the process. We're still working completely with them, which their data center service is called Azure. So all of our servers and all that stuff is in their cloud, which is Microsoft Azure. And essentially what we do is we take a GP implementation. If you're an existing user, you'll know the updates are not automatic.
Speaker 2:It's actually a pretty drawn out process that I go through to get from one version to the next, and if you miss one you can't just skip it. You kind of have to go in hops to get to the newest version. So one of the things we do is we have to have a unified platform. Everybody has to be on the same version. So if you come on our platform, you get upgraded to the newest version and the infrastructure is shared.
Speaker 2:And that's how we keep the costs down, because otherwise it can be very prohibitive to have enterprise scale type hosting right. So what we do is we have shared front end servers and shared SQL servers, but they are completely instanced. So there's no, there are physical walls between clients. There's no way they could ever see each other's data or anything like that, but from a front end experience it looks like it's just running on your desktop, because we're using a bunch of different tools Some of them Microsoft, some proprietary, some third party that allow you to basically publish it as an app on your desktop as if you were using it locally kind of like Citrix, but a little bit different.
Speaker 1:Okay, cool, and you got some kind of secret sauce to make that work a shared environment, so that really can lower the cost. I know when I was a partner we tried to figure that out. It wasn't easy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no for sure.
Speaker 1:With dedicated servers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it took us about a year to work out all the cakes, because there's a ton of things like printers you need to be able to print, obviously. So you know, when we first set it up and we had printing done in our test environment, we noticed that, oh, I see his printers when I log in and he sees mine, and so there's all kinds of security that has to be taken care of. And then the biggest complicating factor was data connections, right? So, if you want, the API for GP is called eConnect and it requires a dedicated OData connection to the SQL data. So figuring out how to do that in a shared environment, I would say, was probably the biggest challenge, right, and your secret sauce.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the secret sauce. Challenge Right and your secret sauce. Yeah, and the secret sauce. So you know what? What differentiates you and your unique features from other kind of hosting themselves, of partners, do their own, have a CSP, or even just competitors that also provide similar services.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's not a ton of competition in this space. But I would say definitely the biggest factor for somebody that's not already in the cloud, moving to our services can be cost, because the cost is driven way down in the shared environment. What differentiates us from our partners is more about our approach, the way we charge. It's subscription-based. There's no upfront fees, there's no backend fees, there's no fees for anything really except a per user per month charge, and we've kept it like that from the very beginning. So we've managed to keep that sort of principle in place through the entire growth of our ecosystem.
Speaker 2:But the biggest factor to get somebody to move to the cloud obviously is just the convenience of being able to access GP from everywhere.
Speaker 2:Anywhere you can get internet access anyway. But doing so at a reduced cost is obviously a big draw Because whether you have it in the cloud or not, you're paying those fees indirectly by having to maintain the hardware and having to maintain a staff to maintain the actual software in the operating system, licensing that goes on in the background. All that costs money. So you're eliminating that off your books and you're getting a set monthly fee. So the other thing is if it's in your closet or in a data center somewhere else. The costs can vary from month to month because maybe one month you need an update, next month or two you cruise with nothing, and then all of a sudden there's a major update that you need to do on on the operating system and so that's going to take a lot of it work and you know after hours and all that kind of stuff. So we eliminate all that and make it predictable. It's going to be the same price every month and we worry about all that back end.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I don't have to worry about patch updates, security. What if there's a new update from Microsoft or Dynamics GP, things like that, do you?
Speaker 2:take care of that, take care of it, yep.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And you said users.
Speaker 1:So the subscription is based on what type of users? Named users, concurrent users. It's concurrent.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's concurrent users. We went with the same model as GP Perpetual. We thought that made the most sense. Yeah, because you have a lot of people that just log in to check something, right? They don't really need to pay for a full license all the time.
Speaker 1:And so we recognized that and we wanted to keep it the same, so it gives you the most flexibility. Yeah, so kind of parallels their current licensing and that's the subscription. Okay, so you talked about the shared services. Are there any other solutions or offerings that you have?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there is. For the larger clients or clients that have a really complicated environment, we have a dedicated offer which essentially means you get a dedicated front-end server or servers, in this case and it's at a reduced monthly cost per user. So the monthly charge per user goes down, but you pay that upfront fee for the whole environment. The advantage to that there's quite a few, but one of the big ones is you can actually log into that server. So if you have your own internal IT staff that need to maintain a bunch of integrating systems, you'll get full access to that and they can go and do their own thing. And also it allows us to bring up what we call a staging environment. So for these larger implementations where maybe they have integrations that run, you can have a test company anywhere. That's not a problem. But we're talking about like a full replica of the SQL server, the front-end server, the RD server, so they can do testing there before they try to move something into production. So that would be the bigger service for the larger clients service for the larger clients.
Speaker 2:And then the new one that we just introduced recently is called GP365 Archive, which is obviously relevant because of some of the changes in the space for companies that want to maintain access to the data for GP because they've moved on to another platform, but they still need it for historical reasons. So it's a very low cost offer that doesn't come with all the fantastic performance of our other two offerings. So it's a very low cost offer that doesn't come with all the fantastic performance of our other two offerings, so it's a little bit slower. It's not intended for a bunch of people to be transacting. It's really read only, although you can still transact. But it allows you to bring GP along with all your add-ons. So if you have third parties and stuff, they can all come too, but they can go on this cheaper service that allows you to access that data pretty much indefinitely.
Speaker 1:So if they're moving to another system, like Business Central for example, they can still have their history and access it for audits or reports. I feel like that's always a conversation in any implementation how much history do we get to bring over? And that's expensive, right.
Speaker 2:It is. It is, and there are some other solutions out there that we have to acknowledge, like. Popdoc is a fantastic one, but it really only allows you to see the data in that format, whereas if you do it with GP365 Archive, it's all there as it was before. So it has that advantage, but we do love PopDoc.
Speaker 1:Are there any industries that you specialize or work with?
Speaker 2:There's one in particular which would be in the insurance industry, but our product is for everybody and it's not industry specific. But we just happened to fall into that through a partnership and so that would be probably one of our specializations, but really it's meant for any company that's running GP. So there's no sort of advantage if you're in one industry versus another, but we do tend to work more closely with people in the insurance and the financial services industries.
Speaker 1:Okay, all right. So I know you said that you cover all kind of the backend of servers and all that licensing. What about, like the GP licensing the GP support the third parties. And third party licensing Like what are you what's included in that subscription versus what the partner might provide that client?
Speaker 2:Yeah for sure. So we're completely partner centric. So we don't do any of that licensing and we don't do any of that support either. We don't even have the staff for it. So our business is solely the back end, the technical side. But we work with partners. In fact, having a partner with us is mandatory because we can't take you on without one.
Speaker 2:So they're still responsible to handle all the front-end licensing, all the third-party licensing office, if they have it, and then obviously the support, functional support and the way we work. Of course the customer, the end customer, can contact us if they can't log in or something like that. We're there 24-7 for that. But usually we recommend that the support still gets routed through the partner, because nine times out of 10, if they need us, they'll reach out to us directly and that way we can coordinate directly with the partner. A lot of the stuff that we'll need to do maintenance-wise will be when nobody's logged in. Somebody needs to coordinate that and make sure that that's happening. And then we do the dirty work, the stuff that happens, you know, in the middle of the night when nobody else wants to be working. We do that part of it so that the client doesn't have an interruption to their business, and that's one of the approaches that we take. That's a bit different.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a really nice differentiator. So the partners themselves don't have to be handling that too.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, business consultants, I mean, they do have a technical knowledge, a lot of them are technical prowess, but it's not their primary focus, and so we want them to focus on the stuff that interests them and also make sure that they don't have to work in the wee hours of the night, right, because they need to be on the next day to deal with the client.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and infrastructure is kind of a special skill set, right, I know.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:In my past life it always seemed like, you know, even though we had technical team members on the consulting side, we often had to work with our IT or managed service team, and their skill sets are really different, you know so.
Speaker 2:Yep and their way of thinking is different in a lot of cases. Right Process of elimination is the way the IT world right. So it's a different group, but they get along really well. So our technical consultants are working with partner consultants all the time and they do get each other at least, whereas the end clients not so much get the technical people.
Speaker 1:Right, right.
Speaker 2:Let them talk.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good point because you guys have a GP background. You solely work with GP, so that's huge because you know what the requirements are, you know what questions to ask, you know what they're going to need and they work right alongside the partner in that process, making sure everything's covered.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:So tell us the story of how you've been successful with your solutions with partners, customers, and why you were successful.
Speaker 2:Well, I think definitely. The why is just because it's so simple and easy for the client. At the end of the day, what we've done is tried to make it completely seamless. So if we engage with a partner, that partner will introduce the concept, the idea, to their customers and if there's any uptake or any interest, they can involve us for a demo. But once the client has made a decision to move forward, it's really simple.
Speaker 2:We schedule a meeting where we have a kickoff to explain what you need to do on your end and by your end I mean the customer, the end customer, and it's really shockingly simple. But we even offer a training session for them to show all of their end users, because end users don't like change. So we want them to have no surprises and know exactly what's going on. But then what we do is, on a Friday a close of business, assuming they're closed.
Speaker 2:On the weekends a Friday close of business we take copies of everything from wherever it is, whether that's in a local server, closet or on another data center, and we leave the original completely intact. So there's no risk, no fear, right? So if anything goes wrong while we're bringing it off, they can just continue to use it the way they were and then over the course of that weekend we run it through our systems, bring it up to the same version as the rest of our tenants and then on Monday when they come in, they just log in through GP365. And it's exactly what they need just log in through GP365, and it's exactly what it is Exactly Just another day in the office. So we just made, we just tried to make it really really easy and simple.
Speaker 1:Good, so it's not the nightmare you know you might have. That perception is going to be tough, it's going to be hard. You guys take care of everything, so Exactly. So I'm kind of curious. I know you, you and I talked, talked about there's some customer success story that you had told me about in the insurance industry. You want to talk about that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, so we've partnered with one of the big three accounting firms I can't say which one, but we partnered with them quite a while ago to bring GP365 into a service that they're offering to the insurance industry, and so we've had a lot of traction, success with that. It originally was just in Ontario, which we're in Canada, but it's moved out now even into the US, so with other insurance companies and essentially it's just clients can use GP on GP 365 and it's integrated with a custom platform that they've developed, and so it's a very strong partnership and because everything has gone so well, it's been growing. So it's really exciting sort of you know move for us in terms of you know, we had to build an integration to get it working, but once we did that, the uptake has been really, really promising.
Speaker 1:That's awesome and I know you told me another story a while ago, but kind of a large Canadian partner that also came to you and said hey, you know what it makes sense for us to have you work with our customers that want to go to cloud. Can you tell me about that story?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so they again. They're actually a very big GP partner and they are one of the big I don't even know if it's big, three, big, five, big, whatever and they had their own hosting solution in place for a GP that they'd had in place for many years. But they were doing a cost analysis on it and they found that the revenues they were generating didn't justify the costs because they had to keep the staff, even though it was their own data center. The costs were still high enough that they said you know what? We need to decommission this and we need to find somewhere to go. And so, by chance, we met with them and as soon as they saw our solution, they said this is it, this is the moment we're going to move everybody over to you. So over the course of it was a pretty quick move. Over the course of that six months we moved all of their clients from their data center onto GP365. So that was really really stressful time, but also very exciting, right.
Speaker 1:Right, oh yeah. But you know, I think about partners that have maybe their own CSP or their own cloud services and man of services, and this just might be another opportunity to kind of figure out what you're good at and focus on that and partner with someone on things that maybe aren't necessarily something you want to focus on, and you can still have that modern workplace and all that kind of licensing. They still can do that as a Microsoft partner with you, right? Oh yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Okay, perfect.
Speaker 1:So what are some of the new things that you're introducing to add value to help customers? On their journey to the cloud.
Speaker 2:Well, one of the interesting things we're looking at, we develop, I guess, products inside of our platform, which is GP365, that will integrate with different areas of the GP system itself.
Speaker 2:One example is, if you're familiar at all with something called project accounting and GP, it has an expense and employee expense system that leaves a bit to be desired in the sense that it's an older, antiquated, I would say, part of the application, but it's also very popular and it's still pretty used.
Speaker 2:So basically it's a system where employees can log their expenses, just to make it really simple, but it doesn't have the ability to attach receipts. It doesn't work on a mobile platform, so you have to log into the GP client to log your expenses. It doesn't handle tips and taxes and all that stuff correctly without manipulation. So what we've done is we've built into our interface the front end for that. Where it is going to be supported on a mobile device, you can upload and attach your receipts. It will, based on the settings that you configure, do the tip and tax calculations automatically and all that data gets fed into the project accounting system or you can feed it into accounts payable. So you have flexibility on how you do the integration, but it just kind of takes older areas of GP that maybe have lost focus. Yeah, yeah, yeah, very useful, but not being used Make it more modern.
Speaker 2:Make it more modern, bring it up to speed. Yeah, we do that without manipulating GP at all. So one important thing our approach is always external and then communicate with GP through the API. We don't build anything into GP because that causes problems when you're upgrading. It makes it more complicated.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, okay. Anything else that you're looking to add to that journey?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I guess one of the other big buzzwords these days is AI. So we're working this is still a ways out, but we're working on some reporting tools, some analytics tools that will be built into our platform that will use ai features, like through through co-pilot right, we're using the co-pilot system to analyze data and produce results so you'll be able to ask real language questions and it should be able to answer them for you that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:so a new thing I just learned. A conference I went to Microsoft talked about and agents. So, I have that kind of national conversation with AI and using agents.
Speaker 2:Yep, exactly, yeah, they're going to be bringing support for that, so it's something that we're tapped into for sure. It's exciting.
Speaker 1:It's exciting. So I know you said you've been in the channel for a few years. Okay so, but what have you seen in the past couple years as far as like changes in the channel?
Speaker 2:well, I'd say the biggest change in the channel is obviously the end of life notice for gp itself. So we've learned that they're ending the, the development cycle and all that on in 2029, at the end of the year. They want to get that last. They extended it so we could get that last tax update there, and I think they're going to end the patches and hot fixes and security updates in 2031, I think April of 2031. So that's a big change.
Speaker 2:The initial reaction to that was actually an uptick for us, because people want to feel supported and even if Microsoft ends their support, we're going to continue to support the platform and the product indefinitely. So as long as there aren't those people using it, we're going to be there, and that kind of takes away some of that fear of not having somebody to help you if some technical issue happens, where we're still going to be there to handle that. And you know there's a bunch of I've heard a lot of feedback from companies that are just sick of subscriptions and being forced to go to a subscription model, and we all know that GP is a perpetual license. So there's a lot of people that are standing their ground and saying no, we're just going to continue to coast off of our perpetual license. So there's a lot of people that are standing their ground and saying, no, we're just going to continue to coast off of our perpetual licenses and not have to pay for support anymore. It'll be cheaper. So we'll see.
Speaker 1:There's a long road ahead. Still use DP. It's not going to shut off.
Speaker 2:There's a long road ahead. I wouldn't want to underestimate it.
Speaker 1:I think you're right. I think it's going to take some time for those. You know the thing I heard this week at this conference. I went to that if everybody wanted to go to the cloud tomorrow. There isn't enough people in the channel to help do that, so we definitely need to get people kind of thinking about their plan. But we've got time.
Speaker 2:And the way we've positioned ourselves is we're that stepping stone as well. So if you do have it in mind that you do want to move, the way we've set it up is if you're on our platform so if you're on GP365 Plus or GP365 Dedicated, you can move to Archive for free. So at the moment where you're moving, you'll have lickety, lickety split access to your historical data without having to spend any money up front. So it's kind of an incentive to move yeah, to move now, and not worry about the end of life. These implementations can take years too. Right, that's the other thing to remember. We're not yeah, we're not talking about a quick, a quick migration so there's no upgrade button.
Speaker 2:It is a new implementation.
Speaker 1:They move something else. So, yeah, that kind of supports that client they get to the cloud. They don't have to worry about maintaining that server in the back closet yeah exactly While they're focused on their business and other investments, so any new trends on the horizon. We talked about AI, but anything else.
Speaker 2:I guess one area that's been a concern, I'd say for the last couple of years now, is there's been a lot of cyber attacks, a lot of just general attacks against web-based companies, web services. So one of the things we focus very seriously on is the security aspect of our platform, our product. So we have all the front-end security to avoid things like denial of service attacks. We have back-end security, one thing we still do, which some people wonder why we get involved when we don't have to. But whenever a new user wants to sign up, it does require interaction from one of our team members to turn the account on, because we never want to see a bot somehow manage to penetrate.
Speaker 1:I need a new user.
Speaker 2:Exactly so we have that human touch point involved where we actually need to talk to somebody before we're going to give somebody access to your data, and so we kind of maintain that as a just to maintain the rigorous caution I would say. But security is definitely a big part of what we do and, of course, because we're in the Azure stack, all the compliance, you get all the enterprise compliance and stuff built into that, which is a huge benefit to our clients.
Speaker 1:That is huge right. It's almost hard to pass on all these days without having kind of those compliance security issues also checked off right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly yeah. Whenever we get, we get a lot of audit requests and it's just easy for us to say it's on Microsoft Azure and here's the proof, and they pretty much that's it. They don't need to see much beyond that.
Speaker 1:Okay, awesome. So any other new thoughts on trends or you know, kind of the channel? I know there's a lot of challenges with partners these days, right, yeah, we're seeing, well, we're obviously seeing changes in the partner network.
Speaker 2:Consolidation is one thing that we're seeing happen from time. Yeah, so that's you know whether that's a mergers acquisitions we're seeing all of that kind of behavior and we're we're also seeing, I would say, a maturing of the skillset right, so you're not getting a bunch of young people coming into the, to the space that are going to get trained on GP now. So that skill set is becoming more and more unique and rare in the marketplace, which has a benefit of allowing you to charge more for your services, because you're not competing with a million people Now, you're competing with 100,000 people and that's just going to continue to narrow. So at some point somebody is going to maybe win I don't want to say win overall, but is going to probably get the majority of the GP customers. So it's a matter of maintaining that skill set within your partnership.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a really good point. If there are consultants that have that skill set, you're going. That's a really good point. If there are consultants that have that skill set, you're going to be slowly become a unicorn and you can charge more, because that skill set will still need be needed to help support clients going forward. And and and? They are senior people, these are not juniors, that's right right skills are going to be efficient because they've seen it and done it before well I tell the story.
Speaker 2:I tell the story quite often about. There was a young man that I met, probably 10 years ago now that he was. He was a young, just out of university, but he was learning as400. And as400 for those that don't know is is a very old, like text-based system. And I said well, why are you, why are you learning that Like it's dead? It's been dead for decades. It's made by IBM. And he said because I can earn $1,500 an hour and they fly me all over the world. Because it's usually larger companies that can't afford to rip out the heart of their. You know ERP is the heart of your company, so they don't want to rip it out. You know they might be in the process of migrating, but sometimes that can take a decade if you've got, you know, hundreds of different systems connected to it, so there's a market there for it. He was training on it because of that. So I don't know that we'll see it go to that level of extreme, but that's the same kind of thing, right? It's a very similar kind of situation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that sounds like a good reason to me. I don't know. So, jason, is there kind of one trend, or you know, what are you seeing? What's driving people to come talk to you, either on the partner side or customers?
Speaker 2:or both. Well, it's, it's. I would say the main one is going to be the price, like the cost. Obviously, our solution wouldn't be viable if it wasn't less expensive than doing it yourself, because everybody would do it themselves. So I'd say that's the main driver. But then again, it's just about our approach process and the fact that we this is all we do, so we're dedicated completely to it. It's 100 focus, and so we are still evolving and developing around the product. Even though that product may be going end of life in the future, we're still bringing breathing life into it. So one of our things is we're the future of gp. That's our sort of motto. So I think that I like that, yeah. So I think that kind of brings in the interest. If you're on the GP platform and you want to feel like you're loved, we're here. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Get some love. Go to GP365. I like that Exactly. The future of GP. All right, so well. Thank you, Jason, for joining us today on this episode of ISV Talks, and I see you got your contact information here. Do you want to go over that with the audience?
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. My name is Jason Williams and the email is jwilliams at ADEMcom, so that would be J-W-I-L-L-I-A-M-S at ADEM is spelled A-T-E-M dot com, and then you can find out about our company or read about our products. Our website, which is wwwgp365.ca.
Speaker 1:All right, Well, thank you so much, Jason, for being on our episode today. It was really fun to talk with you and learn about your solutions for GP the future.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're welcome and friends. We'll see you on the next episode of ISV Talks. Bye-bye.