Deltek Insight Maconomy Kick-Off Session Q&A

Did you miss Deltek Virtual Insight this year? If so, make sure to check out all of the great sessions, which are available on-demand through the end of this year. Our Maconomy product, consulting and engineering presenters brought their A-game so you don’t want to miss it! (Hint: Kristoffer Mahrt showcases the mobile app, Touch, while in a car and a café) If you missed our Maconomy Kick-off session, read below for a recap.

Register here to access the event content and information. For all customers who previously registered and attended Insight 2020, you too can take advantage of revisiting and can catch any sessions you missed and dive back into the ones you found most useful.

During the Kick-Off, Dan DiStefano, Sr. Director of Product Management, highlights the strategy, innovation and what’s ahead for Maconomy.  Let’s recap what he and the Maconomy Product team shares…

Q: How does Deltek prioritize the roadmap and innovation initiatives for Maconomy?

A: Dan DiStefano, Sr. Director of Product Management, shares: Five key strategic pillars help drive our detailed roadmap plans. As we plan releases, we focus on how we accelerate Innovation, localization, and our cloud service offering, as well as how to remediate potential future threats, such as securing our software stack, and optimizing our technology.  The strategic pillars align Maconomy, with how customers define and execute on your digital transformation strategy. With Maconomy, we want to ensure we’re tackling this from within our application, natively, with both product improvements and purposeful technology investments, as well as providing our clients with the opportunity to execute on their digital transformation strategy across the rest of their IT ecosystem.

Q: Kristoffer Mahrt, what is Maconomy focusing on to improve the user experience?

A: For the past few years, we have been on a transition from our legacy clients to new user interfaces based on modern technology, on modern industry standards and shaped by modern usability design principles to deliver the best possible user experience.

Recently, the iAccess interface has been the primary focus area including transforming it from a simple time and expense sheet application to a highly advanced product. iAccess is now rich in functionality, fast performing, and highly customizable now enabling our customers to move their front office users from the portal and the workspace client to iAccess.

We’ll continue to invest in iAccess – and in the near future we will enrich the iAccess interface with some really powerful new features. One is our resource management tool, People Planner, which will become available from within iAccess. Another is our new ad hoc reporting tool replacing the old analyzer. Finally, in the not so distant future I expect we will start to see support for back office roles in iAccess enabling Maconomy customers to run their entire business with iAccess only.

Q: Chris Challenor, what exciting news around technology, scalability and performance can you share?

A: Over the next 1-3 years, we are actively investing in these six key areas to improve Maconomy’s speed and stability.

1. Proof of concept project - regarding utilization of native database table partitioning offered for both SQL Server and Oracle.  This will increase performance, reduce database maintenance overheads (with operations such as backups or DB copies), and lay the foundation for faster upgrades with much less downtime.
2. Database maintenance plans – working with database experts, we plan to deliver tools that will dynamically optimize the database in terms of ensuring optimal indexes, statistics, and other similar improvements, over time.
3. Internal build processes into Continuous Integration or Continuous Delivery (CICD model), and this will allow us to reduce the time and complexity related to taking on the latest software changes released by us. Think of always being able to always keep your Maconomy system fully up to date without the big bang efforts around huge upgrades.
4. Automated extension upgrades - to take the pain and again the cost out of what can often be one of the largest resource consumers at present.
5. Customer’s Quality Assurance process improvements - this includes load, and automated functional test tools, further development of our new Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution and a new Release Management Tool which will compare and report on differences between environments at any given time.
6. Scalable Server Architecture – the move to CICD will allow us to offer dynamic scaling of a Maconomy solution to scale up performance when needed (for example at month or year end), and scale down during less busy periods.  Thereby providing the power required but only for the time needed, and therefore minimizing the cost.

Q: Chris Girardin, how has Maconomy’s localization and statutory reporting strategy evolved to become a formal pillar of our product strategy?

A: About five years ago we revamped our localization strategy, capitalizing on our relationship with BDO Global, acting as our advisor, as well as by introducing a significant number of core product enhancements to support various countries around the world.  BDO, helps keep us updated on any changes in regulations around our prescribed Full and Basic Localization countries, but also to conduct detailed audits and gap analyses of our product. 

Our strategy is built on a strong product foundation, with a General ISAE Certification conducted by BDO Global, and alongside the general foundation is our country-specific tier, to which we look to have regional coverage of both Full and Basic Localization countries, in order to provide functionality and visibility to our clients so they can be equipped to do business globally with Maconomy.

Q: Kimberly Sack, what is Maconomy’s cloud strategy and why is the Deltek Cloud something every customer should consider as a component of their digital transformation journey?

A: We take a cloud-first strategy with Maconomy. This means that we consider the impact of our releases in the cloud and prioritize cloud from development through support. With the continuous evolution of cloud computing– we are confident that we’ve matured all three of our cloud offerings: Maconomy Essentials, Flex and Enterprise Cloud to support you, our customers, with your growth and innovation plans.

Security is prioritized for Maconomy, as well as all Deltek products, starting with the software development lifecycle then through service design, build-out and continue through operational support. In 2020, we’ve also focused on accelerating our roadmap with regards to cloud platform and service. 

Overall, we’re really excited with both the maturity of our cloud offerings this past year as well as, the acceleration of our clients moving to the cloud and even more excited to plan for 2021 so you can see even more innovative and cost-saving measures. 

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Learn More

If you’re interested in learning more about what’s new in Maconomy, register for Deltek Virtual Insight below and watch one of the 17 on-demand sessions we have available. Contact your Account Manager or Customer Success Manager to learn more.