 Part the Third, in which Jason tries to make sense of the cross-platform "freedom of choice" Sage keeps talking about...
One of the common themes of Insights 2004 and 2005 was that Sage wants to open up options for its customers while reducing its own reliance on funding rival Microsoft by opening up access to other technology platforms. CEO Ron Verni made a careful point to mention it in his keynote speech, both years.
Yet Sage's movement in that direction has been extraordinarily puzzling. For starters, consider the company's common desktop and integration platform initiatives, which are eventually supposed to form the basis for essentially all of its enterprise applications. To create this platform, Sage chose to build on Microsoft .Net. You know. The heavily Windows-oriented architecture layer from aforementioned rival Microsoft.
In the SMB space, Microsoft SQL Server has gained a lot of traction. That, of course, is good news and bad news for Sage—it gives them a database platform they can reasonably expect will be within the reach of their customers, but funds that rival again if they support it too diligently. When I heard last year that Sage was looking into expanding database choice for its market, my mind naturally turned to MySQL, the open source database that proves itself day in and day out on literally thousands of ISP and ASP machines, ships as a standard component of many Linux distributions, and so on. But, no, Sage's idea was to build tighter linkages with... IBM DB2, hardly a cost-competitive option for most SMB environments.
There was no sign of MySQL this year, either. There was more emphasis on the common desktop and integration layer. And then there was ACT Premium for Web, demonstrated at a private press session. I had a feeling I knew the answer when I asked the question, but I asked it anyway.
"Browser support: IE only?"
Came back the answer: Yes.
There's really no more fundamental way of saying "We're going to tie ourselves to Microsoft architectures" than to build your browser-based applications to only support Internet Explorer. There's really no more fundamental way you can contradict your CEO's statement that cross-platform support is important to you than to tie your browser-based application to Internet Explorer.
The demo team did go on to say that there is probably some functionality already present for Netscape and Mozilla and that they're looking at supporting those browsers more closely, but I'll believe it when I see it. And if you think this was rough heckling, you should have heard the guy from Network World Fusion lay into them once I let the cat out of the bag.
Ultimately, if Sage really does want to tie its products to Microsoft, it doesn't bother me. Particularly considering their target market, they have rational reasons to do so. What baffles me is the fact that the company's CEO consistently says moving away from Microsoft-tied architecture is a key priority, when operationally Sage, if anything, seems to be weaving even tighter links. Long gone are the days when investors would inflate your stock price if you said "Linux" in the right places, so it can't be that sort of ploy. Is Verni simply mentioning it to get me and the minority of integrators in his audience interested in cross-platform technologies excited over nothing? That seems unlikely. But I'm stumped for a better explanation.
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.
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