Najaxa Software is part of a profile series featuring startups participating in the Innovation Path at Cloud Wars Expo, taking place June 28-30 in San Francisco.
Who They Are:
Najaxa Software is a nimble Fargo, N.D.-based startup that cut its teeth in the Microsoft Dynamics GP world but is rapidly migrating to support Acumatica ERP installations, deliver a range of database services, and advise customers on cloud migrations.
Started by Jamie Evenson as a services business solving timely business problems for customers, Najaxa has evolved into custom software development, integration, ERP, and more advanced services, says company president Nate Evenson. In fact, the company got its start when one customer asked Evenson for help with a pressing payroll issue that other partners were not able to solve (more to come on that customer success).
The company’s customers scale all the way up to $800 million in revenue — not bad for a four-year-old company with humble beginnings but big aspirations. The company does not disclose its number of employees or its revenue, but it clearly is aiming at big target: the ERP market.
Nate Evenson joined his wife at Najaxa after a 12-year career at Microsoft, so he knows the ins and outs of Microsoft technology, support, and resolving customer issues. The company prides itself on its midwestern location, work ethic, and desire to exceed customer expectations.
“90% of the problems we face are not technical. What we do is show up and deliver. Nothing we’re solving is rocket science; nothing in ERP is that hard. It’s about putting the right team together and getting results; that’s the biggest hurdle we see.”
Nate Evenson, president of Najaxa Software
What They Do:
Najaxa began as a Microsoft Dynamics GP Business Partner, with deep expertise in that ERP platform due to Jamie Evenson’s professional history. “We were primarily started to solve problems that many customers faced that were not getting resolved,” says Nate Evenson. “It was about consistency and partners not delivering value. We saw a huge opening to step in and build a services company to start with, where we were focused on delivering what we say we’ll deliver.”
The company’s top vertical industry is the staffing industry, where payroll issues like those that launched the company loom daily. “Those organizations have payroll that needs to get out the door by certain timelines. When they can’t get resolution, it backs up the entire business and they’re frantic to get things figured out,” explains Jeff Nichols, vice president of business development.
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The company remains a partner of record for a lot of Dynamics GP customers but it doesn’t sell much of the software at this point, as it ramps up emphasis on Acumatica, an ERP platform it began offering as a value-added reseller of Acumatica ERP in late 2021.
Acumatica’s ERP system offers a couple major benefits to Najaxa and its customers: strong payroll functionality plus ease of integration with widely used systems that customers have in place, including Salesforce CRM and DocuSign. Payroll functionality includes unlimited work locations, automatic geocoding of state and local taxes, as well as federal and state tax filing.
When compared to building integrations with Dynamics GP, Acumatica provides a night-and-day distinction. “GP had a ton of friction with integrations,” Evenson says. “We’re developing integrations overnight with Acumatica. We’re looking for frictionless integrations for our customers.”
While Salesforce and DocuSign are two common platforms for integration, “really the sky’s the limit,” Evenson says. “Anything with a REST API, we can integrate really easily.”
The ERP (Dynamics GP/Acumatica) business represents roughly half of the company’s revenue today, while the other half comes from its “data” business, which includes a range of services related to Microsoft SQL Server databases and cloud migrations.
Najaxa’s SQL Server Health Assessments apply a set of 200+ rules to uncover configuration issues. It will identify configuration drift, improper implementation, new features not being utilized, failing SQL agent jobs, improper maintenance strategies, and missing/failed backups.
Other SQL Server services include performance assessments, development of high availability/disaster recovery strategies, and data integration services.
The company performs assessments to help customers determine if they are ready for a cloud migration — and Evenson noted that a move to the cloud isn’t right for all customers.
Najaxa performs database migration assessments and Azure migrations. But Najaxa execs recognize that not all companies are ready to make the move to cloud today. “Sometimes it’s the workload they’re nervous about,” Evenson says. “Customers that don’t fit [for a cloud migration] are usually an edge case or legacy app that they don’t want to touch. It’s usually emotional on the customer’s part.”
Evenson and Nichols emphasized that the question of whether to migrate to the cloud can be tricky, so their focus is on working with customers to develop a clear understanding of their requirements in order to recommend the best plan.
While Najaxa does the bulk of its cloud integration and migration work with Microsoft Azure today, its expertise is not limited to Azure. The company has worked in Amazon AWS but Evenson says they try to nudge customers toward Azure. “It’s cheaper and makes more sense when the product was developed by Microsoft in their cloud.”
Who They’ve Impacted
Outsource LLC is the aforementioned customer that called on Jamie Evenson in a pinch, and that relationship ultimately led to the formation of Najaxa. Outsource tapped Jamie Evenson when it migrated from one CRM system to another, experienced a failure, and the previous vendor wasn’t able to remedy the situation. The CRM system connects to a back-end Dynamics GP system. “We had three weeks of payroll missed in the gap,” says Charles Brunner, vice president of finance at Outsource. “That caused a lot of issues.”
“We’re talking about 8,000 transactions that we had to bring back in, recover, all of that. A staffing agency lives and dies by processing payroll in a timely, efficient way and making sure everyone’s taxes are accurate.”
–Charles Brunner, VP of finance at Outsource LLC
At risk: “We’re talking about 8,000 transactions that we had to bring back in, recover, all of that,” Brunner recalls. “A staffing agency lives and dies by processing payroll in a timely, efficient way and making sure everyone’s taxes are accurate.” Evenson helped the company by reverting transactions from all those weeks and had to bring the old CRM system back up to restore normal business operations.
In addition to the huge value that was added in this one case, a couple of other reasons make Najaxa Brunner’s favorite vendor: The company behaves as a partner with a true stake in his business, and it’s always proactively looking at ways to help his business grow and be more adaptable. “That proactiveness speaks volumes about their commitment to clients,” he says.
The Future:
Expect continued growth for Najaxa from its new focus on Acumatica, and its work to help customers in the staffing industry (and other industries) across the U.S. and Canada to navigate tax complexities, and to effectively manage integrations with the diverse systems they maintain.
Although the company’s revenue today is split halfway between ERP and data, Evenson expects the data side of the business to grow larger in the next year: “We’re growing that business pretty quickly. We’re finding there’s a massive need.”
Migrating to the cloud — or evaluating a cloud migration — is a top-of-mind consideration for many business leaders, so Najaxa can safely assume that the more wins it creates for customers, the more it should find prospective cloud customers knocking at its door.
Closing Thoughts:
It’s fun to engage with a small, agile company and to take the pulse of activities going on in ERP, data, the cloud, and the customer. Najaxa got its start by responding directly to the business needs of one customer, and it clearly intends to maintain that responsive mindset as its business continues to expand and evolve.
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