As a loyal Microsoft partner, Boyer & Associates was excited to hear the company’s recent announcement regarding Project Madeira, a reinvented accounting or ERP solution for small and midsized businesses. Project Madeira connects with tools in Office 365 to manage finances and streamline operations. This Software as a Service will be running on Microsoft Azure and is scheduled to become generally available in the U.S. during the second half of 2016.
We applaud Microsoft’s choice to build this new product on the NAV platform as we see this as the best choice technically and the most error-free platform. It will also be much easier for us to become very good at this new SaaS offering since we’ve already made a big investment in NAV.
I am particularly interested to see how many of the feature-rich capabilities Microsoft will need to take out of NAV to make this product a viable option for its target market. Most of these firms will likely be smaller and may not have the same level of accounting resources on staff that a typical Dynamics NAV client has.
It appears Microsoft’s intention will be to target the Intacct size prospective firms that are outgrowing Quickbooks rather than the NetSuite size prospects. The latter needs to be much larger in order to afford the significant and constantly increasing annual cash outlay each year.
So what is unique about this new product? Here are three key features of Project Madeira:
- A new productivity level– Project Madeira reduces time wasted switching between programs and email. It identifies content such as invoices and quotes within Outlook, and presents the information needed to take action – without exiting Outlook.
- Cloud first – This product is designed as a multi-tenant public cloud service on Azure, meaning small and mid-sized organizations can get it working quickly and know their data is better protected in large-scale datacenters.
- Mobile first – Madeira is built for a mobile workforce. With an easy to use look and feel across any device. Clients can access Madeira through a Web browser, PC running Windows, a Mac or Android device.
We know that in California neither Intacct nor NetSuite is terribly happy about having to compete with Microsoft in the Software as a Service arena. As Microsoft-only partners, we at Boyer & Associates could not be happier.
Contact Boyer & Associates for more information.
