technologyreseller.co.uk 37 continued... Technology Reseller talks to iplicit CEO Lyndon Stickley about the cloud accounting software provider’s stellar growth and the opportunities for MSPs customers, no route to market and no clear plan of what to do with it. “He had 23 years of implementation consultancy experience for Agresso, SAP and Oracle, running a 15-man consultancy team. He would go onto a site and be there between nine months and two years. He charged hundreds of thousands of pounds and the system would cost millions. He felt that every time the car would arrive in 10,000 bits and he'd spend nine months building a rolling chassis before starting on the customisation. He would then go to the next client and the car would arrive in 10,000 bits and he would nine months building the rolling chassis. Everything was overly complicated, over engineered, overly expensive and designed to keep the customer wedded to the implementation partner and the consultant and the vendor. His dream was to build a nimble system that could do what a powerful system could do and implement it in days and weeks not months and years. “He spent three years and nearly £3 million with a team of programmers designing the system. I met him as he was about to go broke.” In the noughties, Stickley had had an agency and one of his clients was Exchequer Software, which was acquired by IRIS Software in 2005 and then sold to Advanced Software Group in 2013. He made a few calls to his old contacts and iplicit was born. “To cut a long story short, we identified the Exchequer base of 3,000 sites that had been built up by my old clients and were being left with no cloud path whatsoever. We married the Exchequer founders and some of the original Exchequer team with the development team, put in a million quid and bankrolled what we thought would be a tiny business with about 15 staff to go and bring cloud to Exchequer customers.” In its first year iplicit signed 20 customers – all Exchequer users wanting to get out of that system but unwilling to spend £100k upfront and £50k plus a year on NetSuite or Dynamics. “We came along at just the right time. Our plan was to rescue 1,000 Exchequer customers and build a small business of 30 or 40, maybe 45, staff. Shame on us for being so naive. In the last five years, we've gone from no users a day in 2019 to more than 23,000 today, with about 1,200 organisations now on our platform. We came to market with an Exchequer salvation and suddenly we started getting enquiries from users of Pegasus, Sage 50, Sage 200, Navision, Great Plains, old SAP, a whole bunch of systems. “We realised in 2020 that this isn't an Exchequer salvation. This is an onpremises salvation and that the vendors that had been selling on-premises systems over the last 20 to 30 years weren't giving customers modern day cloud systems. The industry had been shaken up 25 years ago when NetSuite came in at the high end with an early-stage enterprise-level cloud and then 15 years ago when Xero came in to super-disrupt the entry level market. The mid-market of organisations with 30 staff In line with its designation of 2024 as ‘the year of the partner’, UK cloud accounting software provider iplicit has appointed Paula Cooper as Head of its Channel Reseller Programme. Before joining iplicit, Cooper spent 18 years with Sage, where she specialised in channel partnerships and headed up the accounting software giant’s UK and Ireland sales operation for mid-market organisations. She has also worked on the reseller side, as Sales Director for K3 FDS and Protean Software. Cooper’s appointment comes as iplicit ramps up its channel engagement to turbo-charge its growth. The company is on course for its sixth consecutive year of more than 100% growth in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and is building a network of channel partners to help it expand further and faster. “Last year, our revenue was about 90% direct and 10% through our partner channel,” explains iplicit CEO Lyndon Stickley. “This year we want around 40% of our revenue to come through the partner channel and about 45% of deployments to be through partners because we're capping our own deployment capacity and have an edict to expand through partners not through staff. In 2025 we want to see a greater level of selling through our partner base than our direct team.” The company’s partner programme (see below) gives MSPs, as well as accountants and software resellers, an opportunity to share in iplicit’s success as it continues to shake-up the accounting software market by making it quicker and less costly for SMEs to move from on-premises systems to true cloud accounting. Stickley describes this as a generational disruption on a par with the move from Blockbusters to Netflix, but admits that he did not appreciate the scale of the opportunity when he launched iplicit in 2019 after coming to the aid of an implementation consultant for Agresso, SAP and Oracle who had developed a finance system but at the time had no Growth through the channel Business Design Centre · London · 17 September 2024 ICT · MANAGED IT · MOBILE · PRINT 24 in partnership with Exhibitor Paula Cooper
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