Comments on: The Road Ahead for Sage

By: Saying goodbye to Tom Miller – or – what do you do when Superman retires? by Peter Wolf on February 6, 2013 | Bill's Views From Sunny San Diego

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 21:12:56 +0000

[...] channel advocate, he has overseen a very difficult transition as Sage has made controversial (some would say necessary) moves to a more aggressive and more self-deterministic future that has changed the Sage channel [...]

By: Saying goodbye to Tom Miller – or – what do you do when Superman retires? | Summit Diary

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 14:33:00 +0000

By: On pissing in the punchbowl and NetSuite | Summit Diary

On pissing in the punchbowl and NetSuite | Summit Diary — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 01:52:46 +0000

[...] suppose the management at NetSuite has seen some of the changes at Sage and in the Sage channel and felt that this is a great opportunity for them to pick up some [...]

By: Wayne Schulz

Wayne Schulz — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 12:46:29 +0000

Peter I think you are missing a few details of how Sage has attempted to cross-sell in the past.

Cross selling is most definitely not a brand new “holy crap look at the opportunity to cross sell” moment for Sage.

Rather I would submit it’s been introduced several times before in the mid-market space.

Back in the Y2k’ish era there was a strong push to cross sell upgrades from MAS90 to MAS500.

Similarly several years back (in 2008) Sage announced Project Diamond ( http://www.s-consult.com/2008/05/14/sage-extended-enterprise-for-sage-mas-90-and-200-pricing-announced/ ) — which became Sage Extended Enterprise Suite and bundled in FAS (Fixed Assets) and CRM at not additional cost in a pretty price competitive bundle. I believe this was canned in version 4.4 of Sage ERP MAS 90 aka Sage 100 ERP.

http://www.s-consult.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/extended-enterprise-suite-customer-faq-10-23-08.pdf

Rather the issue here is not the cross sell. That’s been done. It’s the customer benefit of the cross sell which will be defined in several ways:

a. How’s the integration – does it require an army to setup?

b. What’s the expected benefit – easy to determine ROI or do you need to use bogus worksheets like the SaaS folks do which assume you fire every tech person and no longer maintain a server.

c. How is the support and upgrade process?

I think Sage is focussing on the areas that have worked well in cross sell – specifically payments and hopefully they are going to learn that good quality integration that provides ROI and does not require an army to install and upgrade is the path they should follow.