The Blog

  • November 10, 2009
  • Sage Summit Atlanta

    Sage convened its fall user group meeting in Atlanta this week.  The event was set in the cavernous Georgia World Congress Center, a complex of three starship hangers left over from the Intergalactic Olympics.  The facility is beautiful and very big.

    Sage estimated attendance at between 2500 and 3000 people and despite that number of people, the place looked under used.  As you might expect in a recession, Sage officials told me that many companies sent fewer people to the event so that overall attendance was down somewhat year over year though the number of companies sending employees was relatively constant.

    It is important to distinguish between the Sage partner event, Insights, held in May and the user group meeting called Summit.  Since Sage sells exclusively through a partner channel, it makes most of its product and policy announcements at Insights each year.  At Summit, the company focuses more on end-user training and adoption and there is less hard news coming out of the event.

    Jodi Ueker-Rust, President, Sage Business Solutions Division, gave a keynote on Monday that emphasized three directions for Sage and they were meant to cover both front office CRM and back office ERP products.  Rust said the most important directions for Sage included support for increasingly mobile users, emphasis on social media and business intelligence, but the speech seemed short on detail and the CRM group has been executing on all three for a while, score one for the front office.  I sat down with Joe Bergera, GM, Sage CRM Solutions and Larry Ritter, EVP Sage Business Solutions Division for a discussion about the CRM business; here are some highlights.

    My impression of the messages flying around is that there are two different Sages.  One is dedicated to making prudent decisions about moving over to SaaS (let’s call them the front office gang) and the other is digging itself into an untenable position in premise-based solutions, I think of them as back office.

    Sage front office folks have long been leading adopters of social media for internal use, with good results.  The company uses communities built into product specific sites for ACT! and SalesLogix and the officials told me that a significant amount of traffic for CRM products now arrives thanks to Twitter and other inbound social media these days.

    Even more impressive to me is that some CRM products automatically survey new customers at the 60 and 120 day marks just to better understand customer use and tribulations, if any.  I don’t know if other vendors are taking this step but it strikes me as the kind of aggressive customer outreach a vendor has to have especially if the purchasing process is retail oriented – i.e. without a sales representative and maybe without much implementation help.

    Sage is doing a lot with community data and I wish more companies would realize that social media is about the outbound and sexy Twitter and Facebook applications as well as inbound community applications.  Analyzing customer input and data collection is still in its infancy for Sage but Bergera and Ritter tell me they are beginning to see a difference in product uptake that they attribute to social media.

    Good for them, I say.  It’s nice to see a vendor drinking some of the Kool-Aid we’ve been mixing up.  But they haven’t stopped with basic social media blocking and tackling.  One of the more interesting things I discovered is that Sage has produced about 16 short product videos that it deploys on YouTube.

    I am a big believer in using this kind of video as a way to develop thought leadership and leverage social media.  There’s nothing social per se about a video but once it has a url on YouTube it is likely that it can become viral through social media and this is what Sage executives tell me is going on.

    It is also good to see Sage keeping to its 2010 strategy to bring its diverse CRM products into tighter alignment.  So far, the big deliverable has been the ACT! 2010 version introduced in September.  ACT! has made great strides in the last few years moving up market from simple contact management and adding low end SFA functionality and then some.  The addition of e-marketing, for example, has enabled sales people to better generate leads than prior generations of the products.

    I am not an ERP expert and a great deal of any Sage conference is focused on accounting and finance.  Having grown by acquisition, the company has highly specialized ERP solutions for construction, real estate and other sectors that I don’t know much about.

    Sage is a big organization with 14,500 employees, 27,000 partners and $2.55 billion in revenues generated by 5.8 million customers around the world.  It would be nice to see the company step up more vigorously to embrace SaaS in the front office as a long-range goal even if they don’t plan to make any partners or customers convert over night.  The competition form Microsoft, NetSuite and now Salesforce make it necessary.

    The current approach, at least by the back office group, is to stick to their guns, vowing to be an on-premise company leveraging the “software plus services” mantra, which is phony.  It serves no one very well and a more positive message to partners and customers, IMHO, would be to acknowledge that SaaS is an important direction and vow to take customers and partners there when the time comes.  That positive message doesn’t commit anyone to anything immediately but it begins the thinking process for what will be inevitable at some point.

    Leveraging Web services is a good place to start but at some point the Web will be leveraging the premise-based applications.

    Published: 14 years ago


    Discussion

    • November 29th, 2009 at 1:15 pm    

      Hey Dennis,

      Unsure if you saw our wrap-up of the big Sage announcement, but it’s here. All the pros and cons.

      -Adam

    • November 13th, 2009 at 2:18 pm    

      Hello Denis,

      Thanks for the solid wrap-up of the Summit event and the good words about Sage CRM products and strategies. Regarding Sage’s SaaS strategy for back-office applications, you’re correct that we offer a surround strategy, acknowledging that the vast majority of customers ( we have 5.8 million worldwide as you’ve noted) are committed to an on-premises option and can benefit from SaaS services that augment without disrupting their tried and true back-office systems. I’d like to clarify for your readers one point, and agree with the added statement you made so eloquently:

      “…a more positive message to partners and customers, IMHO, would be to acknowledge that SaaS is an important direction, and vow to take customers and partners there when the time comes.”

      That too is our position. On-premises and SaaS are not mutually exclusive. By offering a surround strategy, we help our customers protect their existing investment and provide a path to SaaS if that deployment method makes sense for them. We will also deliver back office functions in a SaaS option when the time is right.

      Kind regards,

      Himanshu Palsule
      EVP – Product and Market Strategy
      Sage North America

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