Wondering How to Install Acumatica Locally?
Check out our Acumatica Installation Guide:
For the past 8 years (and counting!) Acumatica has been consistently named the fastest-growing cloud ERP. One key reason for this can be summed up in a single word: flexibility. Acumatica believes strongly in customer choice. And this focus on the customer explains why business leaders shouldn’t be surprised to learn that Acumatica’s Cloud ERP provides flexible deployment options including SaaS (public cloud) and hosted (private cloud).
In fact, Acumatica is the only ERP publisher that gives customers this kind of choice in one platform, one set of tools, one user interface, and one database. So, if you are curious and want to know more about how to install Acumatica locally at your business, read on.
Why Install a Cloud ERP Locally?
For years, you have been hearing about public cloud (SaaS) benefits such as anywhere/anytime access, almost zero downtime, the ability to cut your IT staffing needs, affordable initial investment expenses due to subscription pricing, and real-time integration with third-party cloud tools (e.g., cloud reporting or cloud inventory management solutions). Since the global pandemic hit, another huge advantage of the cloud has been that it enables employees to quickly and easily move from working in an office to working from their home office without any disruption of service (other than barking dogs in the background). So why, at this point, would anyone want to sidestep SaaS by choosing local ERP deployment?
We admit: these days it is rare for an organization to install Acumatica locally, but the companies that do so have very good reasons for their choice.
Here are some reasons the PC Bennett team has encountered over the years:
- No option: An organization wants to move to a SaaS solution but can’t, due to compliance issues with cloud hosting. It is simply not an option to consider moving to the public cloud.
- Existing mission-critical application or equipment: A company is locked into a contract with an inflexible, yet critical, custom business tool that doesn’t allow for public cloud integration. Private hosting is necessary.
- Business readiness: In some situations, the executive leadership, IT or support team, or other strategic staff members are simply not ready to make the leap to a SaaS solution yet and want more time to prepare. Often, companies see migrating to SaaS as “relinquishing control” of their data (but with Acumatica, your data is always yours).
- Redundancy and development environments: Companies that have custom development capabilities and mission-critical “home grown” applications may need a separate environment to work within. A two-user, non-registered local version of Acumatica (a sandbox) gives them the flexibility to test and develop modifications and enhancements risk free. As mentioned above, Acumatica is uniquely positioned for this situation, as their solution works exactly the same regardless of deployment option!
In the end, it does not matter why an organization wishes to install Acumatica locally. The thing that matters is that Acumatica’s focus on the customer is so unique and powerful that they continue to empower companies with flexible deployment models and the ability to change their deployment choice over time with ZERO negative impact.
In practice, this means you can go home on a Friday, your IT team can do a backend restore on Saturday, and you can begin using the Acumatica SaaS version of the solution on Monday without any interruption and, in most cases, without any need for additional training.
How to Install Acumatica Locally in 5 Steps
The setup process for installing local instances of Acumatica is very easy. This is extremely impressive once you realize that the private and public cloud versions of Acumatica ERP are precisely the same software. When you install Acumatica locally, you’re installing the same software you would be using on SaaS. (Other ERPs use different software for their different deployments.)
Here are the steps to follow to install Acumatica locally.
- Update your servers and computers to the latest software and firmware updates and make sure your patches are up to date too.
- Ensure that your environment meets Acumatica’s minimum operating requirements for the latest Acumatica version. (View the very readable and very modest requirements for Acumatica 2021 R2.)
- Install the Acumatica ERP Tools on your server (detailed instructions). These include:
- Acumatica ERP Configuration Wizard: used to deploy, delete, and maintain application instances (required)
- Acumatica Report Designer: used for designing custom reports (optional)
- Debugger Tools: used to help you debug your application (optional)
- Deploy an instance on your server using the Acumatica ERP Configuration Wizard you just installed (detailed instructions).
- Change the password of the default user to ensure secure operation (detailed instructions).
Sound easy? With some knowledge of computer networking and a little bit of database know-how, it is. However, we all need a little help sometimes.
Get Help with Your Local Acumatica Installation
If your organization is interested in learning more about how to install Acumatica locally, or if you would prefer that Acumatica experts handle the details of installation and support for your new local deployment, simply reach out to your partners at PC Bennett.
Get in touch with the Acumatica experts at PC Bennett
PC Bennett Solutions offers a personalized, full-service experience for customers by implementing business management technology. Through a hands-on approach, PC Bennett Solutions helps companies get the most out of their software system. The team provides training, implementation and customization of Acumatica. Headquartered in the Seattle area, PC Bennett Solutions is one of the largest exclusive Acumatica resellers. Want to learn more about Acumatica? Check out our Acumatica resources page.
