While Technology One was spruiking the benefits of its Connected Intelligence (CI) platform at its annual user conference, some customers said they were still years away from upgrading.
One of the joys of having a customer base in the mid-market is that they are not as well funded and resourced as their tier-one peers.
Maroochy Shire Council IT manager Dorothy Williams, who has been a Technology One customer for four years, said the local government authority is still a year away from moving to Finance One 10.2.
Only then can Williams take the next step and move to the CI platform.
"The CI release looks exciting, but it is a big implementation; resources are poor in local government and any upgrade is tough," she said.
"It means making time to do the testing, all of the reconfiguration and of course, analyzing our user base.
"We're rarely the first when there is a new release and we still find problems when we do make the move."
However, Williams said those problems are being alleviated with the formation of a Local Government User Group in Queensland, which was formed earlier this year and includes more than a dozen councils.
She said the number-one issue for the user group is support, adding that Technology One's support isn't perfect but "compared to other vendors it's good".
With an estimated 300 users on Finance One, Williams plans to integrate the asset module with Finance One but said just getting budget is hard.
"With Technology One everything is out of the box and customization is too expensive," she said, adding that the council didn't go with SAP or Oracle because their products were too big and complex.
Other delegates at the conference were also enthusiastic about the CI platform and said they chose Technology One over tier-one ERP players because of simplicity.
A spokesman for WorkCover South Australia said it reduces staff training, which is a costly problem.
"We don't have to retrain staff every time someone leaves and Technology One is very easy to use," he said.
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