All right, very quickly: Sage Group PLC bought Best Software about 5 years ago. They also bought up Interact Commerce, owners of SalesLogix and Act. Not too much later, Sage decided to brand essentially all of its US operations under the Best banner. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect at the time somebody successfully argued that Sage sounded too British to fly Stateside, whereas Best sounded better than... well, than anything else, given that it was Best. (While it’s true that “Sage Group PLC” did have a bit of a British ring to it, especially with the giveaway PLC bit hanging on the end, it was in a nice, reassuring, “symbol-of-quality” way rather than in an “oh, dear, this software will be full of Monty Python jokes and won’t improve business operations at all!” sort of way.)
Whew. To sum up, that thinking’s out the window, it’s Sage all day, every day, all the time, from now on. (Until someone decides to change it again because customers ask if Sage software will run on 110 volt computers.)
Sage kicked off its channel-focused Insights conference in Dallas today with an executive keynote from Best/Sage US CEO Ron Verni. Verni outlined the company’s ongoing vertical strategy (something which suits it fairly well, both from natural growth and its penchant for buying up software providers with a stranglehold on a specific line of business), which is being built into the Sage delivery model as far down as the cheap-and-cheerful Peachtree product line.
Verni took a few opportunities to refer to ASP/on-demand applications, which have been carving out slices of Sage’s niches for some time now. Each time, he classified the world into two camps—those who want to buy traditional packaged software, and those who want to “buy” ASP-style delivery. “Separated at birth”, he called it. Yet a quick shuffle through my mental inventory of recent case studies I have performed tells me that Verni and I see the world rather differently, because I am never the least bit surprised to hear of a company considering both an in-house software system (or upgrade) as well as an on-demand model. While losing business to the on-demand providers undoubtedly stings, I’m reluctant to accept that companies making that choice are hard-wired into it—or hard-wired against it, for that matter.
To Verni’s credit, even while representing a company with so many different software lines, he found a lot of time to talk about CRM. To the careful listener, however, much of what he said was remarkably similar to what he said 11 months ago at Insights 2004, because the biggest news was the launch of SageCRM—which last year was the relaunch of ACCPAC CRM—which itself was the relaunch of eWare CRM. The graphic showing the marketing position of ACT versus SageCRM versus SalesLogix was even largely unchanged from last year.
But, wouldn’t you know it, sometimes repeating the message and dressing up the name a tiny bit really is all it takes to get results. ACCPAC CRM was greeted with a modest response from the partner audience last year, and industry experts nodded with intrigued, guarded approval, but finding many tangible success stories proved difficult. It seemed like it was the best CRM package nobody was using.
Today, however, was rather different. The line at the SageCRM kiosk during the trade show portion of the proceedings was staggering. I actually ended up bypassing it entirely and ducked around the scene to wave hello to the SalesLogix staffer instead, who had no one to talk to, because there was no way I could get close enough to see what had changed since the last unveiling of ACCPAC/SageCRM. More to come tomorrow.
Speaking of SalesLogix... the SLX boothminders I saw were indeed quite lonely because SLX 7 is still a thing of hope. More news is, again, expected tomorrow.
Again dipping into his 2004 presentation, Verni made a couple of references (more muted than last year, however) about working towards platform independence, perhaps supporting a Linux desktop for some or all Sage applications. Microsoft competes directly with Sage for front and back-office dollars, so the conflict for Sage was clear—appealing to the heavily Windows-based SMB market requires being good at working in Windows, but tying one’s fortunes entirely to Windows fuels the coffers of an arch-rival. That’s what makes my ears prick up every time Verni talks about going cross-platform.
However, in nearly the same breath, Sage then emphasizes its common desktop and integration framework initiatives—initiatives which are based on the Microsoft-driven .Net standard. Now, as then, this makes me wonder just how far one can possibly get from Microsoft if one is going to let Microsoft dictate the application architecture.
But, 11 months and two keynotes later, revelation was finally at hand during the trade show! John Manry, last cited as Sage’s Vice President of Technology and Standards for the Mid-Market Division (I forgot to grab a business card... if they’ve changed his title, watch this space) was at the Common Desktop display and answered my question. Turns out that Sage isn’t simply developing for .Net compliance, but is keeping its eye on the open source .Net interpreter layer, Mono, which in theory could make .Net as universal as Java. Manry said he believes that, if Sage ever does seriously pursue a non-Windows client deployment, the biggest challenge will be replicating certain visual aspects of the common desktop which don’t have a perfect analog outside the Windows world.
On deck for tomorrow: in-depth briefings from ACT and SalesLogix. More thoughts on Sage’s on-demand strategy. And anything else that sidewinds me here in Texas.
None of the companies mentioned in this article have been clients of CRMuse LLC or Jason Compton for at least the past six months. Sage Software is underwriting the travel expenses for this journey.