Charles Rathmann has joined Panatrack as Product Evangelist. Panatrack is an independent software vendor (ISV) that develops and sells software for tracking inventory, assets, and activities. Using data-capture technologies such as barcode, RFID, and mobile handheld computers, we create solutions to track the transactions that are critical to efficient business operations.
After joining Panatrack just long enough ago that I know how to work the coffee machine and transfer calls, I am feeling the ground under my feet. Panatrack is a tiny fraction of the size of the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software company I left to come on board and join my longtime associate Michael Burnham in this endeavor to help make friends and influence people. But the company is an established and venerable as any other independent software vendor (ISV) in this industry, and I stepped into this new role with confidence.
Many of the challenges ISVs and Microsoft itself are facing are very familiar to me. Other issues Dynamics GP users struggle with will present me with a bit of a learning curve I look forward to assaulting.
You can't have worked in software marketing long without trying to help people understand the challenge of evolving enterprise software products to a more cloud-friendly infrastructure. I think Panatrack is positioned pretty well here, with a robust, thick client that communicates with Dynamics GP perfectly well over web protocols without a terminal server intermediary. It will be interesting to see how Dynamics GP evolves as Microsoft continues its focus on its Azure product, but I am confident that Panatrack is well-positioned for this future.
In a time of tightening financial regulation and asset based lending for working capital and acquisitions, asset management is a top priority for many of you. Involvement in fixed asset accounting rather than maintenance-focused asset lifecycle management will have me doing some late night reading.
I have had the pleasure of working with some pretty smart people over the years in the area of automatic data capture (ADC), and I came on board with a strong appreciation for barcode software that extends a core ERP application. There is no substitute for this approach in companies that undertake a large number of asset or inventory transactions. And Panatrack is the vendor of choice for this type of solution for Dynamics GP.
Dynamics GP is used as the general ledger for some large organizations, but can be an attractive solution for small to medium enterprises. It will be a joy to delve into this part of the economy that is on a growth surge now and in the years to come will probably drive more new jobs than the enterprise space, which some folks say is ripe for a bit of a correction in the event that interest rates come back up. I have worked with and for closely-held businesses most of my life, and look forward to becoming re-acquainted with this part of the market where transparency and honesty seem to work well as a business strategy.
The size and scope of the Dynamics GP ecosystem means we at Panatrack will have to work pretty hard to break through the clutter and let value added resellers (VARs) know about our unique value proposition. Between the large number of VARs and the broad spectrum of prospective customers across multiple industries, we know we have a communication challenge on our hands. Yes, our ultimate goal is to sell you on the reliability and stability of Panatrack's robust ADC solutions. But after decades during which the industrial trade media have withered and suffered horrible attrition, we know that it is contingent upon us to provide you, our partners and future customers, with good information and insights into the technology and trends that affect your business software decisions. We will learn together, you and I, about the technology and how to use it to solve your business problems.
Because my post-secondary education lo these many years ago involved learning from some serious hard-nosed journalists, my own approach even to my work as a shameless software shill is to be honest and direct and really try to provide a public service. We have on staff here not only people with deep insights into ADC technology, but also people who can provide expert advice on how to leverage the underlying functionality of Dynamics GP. Among our ISV and VAR partners, there are also insights we will curate and share. So you can expect that we will be packaging up these insights, collected over coffee or scotch or whatever else, into bite-sized morsels you can easily digest on a regular basis.
You will be hearing more from us as we launch new products, forge new relationships, and true to our Midwestern values, strive to be the type of go-giver that Zig Ziglar said we should be.
You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want. ~ Zig Ziglar
So tell me ... what do you really want? And how can we help you get it?
by Panatrack