Charlie Fritch

And so we, my son Chip and I interviewed a number of different platforms, Salesforce, Intact, others, and then decided on the ERP that we would build on top of.

So what we'll talk about in the next few minutes is choosing an ERP, advantages of being an OEM versus a regular VAR.

Does everybody familiar with those acronyms?

Original equipment manufacturer writes original code, the equipment.

A value added reseller just

takes the product, configures it, but without writing any additional code or creating anything new for any specific vertical.

So we looked for an ERP that wanted to partner with us, was one of the key things, and we found one.

So some of the factors, there's a typical royalty revenue split.

With an OEM status versus just a value-added reseller status, you can get a higher split of the revenue.

Some ERP deal terms we'll look at, minimum royalty, fee splits, ownership and rights, and then managing the profitability, how that impacts the costs, what the ERP is contributing to your business, and the results.

So building on top of an ERP, why would you do that?

Well, first of all, as I said, an ERP is a massive project right now.

The major ERPs, as Shaz just showed there, Oracle, NetSuite, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, they're all big companies.

We didn't choose any of those, but I'll show you in a second who we chose.

But these are the points we wanted to look for, broad, excellent, general functionality, not necessarily specific functionality for our vertical.

An ISV community, independent software vendors that are already integrated into that ERP that provide functionality that you can't get from just a standalone software like an accounting program.

So in our world, in the hotel space, we compete with hotel-specific accounting programs, but they're not ERPs, and so they don't have a broad integration with lots of other software that you can take advantage of.

on an ERP.

So the independent software vendor community was a factor.

Commitment to research and development, staying current, having an open API structure, automations and integrations.