General Consultant Discussion

After a lively discussion about Sage 100's Road Ahead challenges, I am curious about any thoughts about Sage 300. Severeal years ago it was supposed to be a ""Strategic Product,"" but now I get mixed messages about it. My short take on its status is that it is essentially in Sage 100's ditch except that Sage was able to put a decent web face onto it. I ask this because I don't see that X3 can meet the economic needs of most current Sage 100 customers, which really means that it won't meet the needs of new ERP prospects. is this another example of Sage execs smoking more wacky backy, or are we perhaps missing something?

We will be a Sage 300 reseller as soon as my latest merger goes through Sage. (The last one took 3+ months, so I'm not holding my breath.) The certified consultant/reseller who is merging with us previously did PFW and has been converting most of his customers to Sage 300, bypassing X3, because it was too much for the PFW customers, both in investment and complexity of features. Many of these also used Batchmaster with PFW and it integrates very well with 300. As we knew, much of the client base for Sage 300 is in Canada and overseas, so the impact in the US is not as evident. We have a local customer (financial requirements only - no distribution or manufacturing) who also has entities in Canada, Europe and Asia. They have asked us to propose a single Sage solution that will cover all of these. We proposed both 300 and X3. X3 is a substantially greater investment, but 300 is able to meet the requirements as well as X3 - multi-language, multi-currency. Functions such as VAT can be accommodated using AvaTax, which has an international version. Sage 300 is a solid package and is very much alive around the world. In addition to the Batchmaster integration, IndustriOS integrates to provide full manufacturing functionality. The only problem Sage may have is that it can and will take business away from X3. That has to be a dilemma for the Sage execs.

Someone said the Sage 300 road ahead wasn't all that much better than 100. I wasn't in the 300 session so can't comment. This slide pretty much summarizes Sage's go-to-market strategy with ERP.

I had dinner with some Sage X3 people and they were surprised to hear what functionality was in 300. They were under the impression that only X3 had certain functionality until I pointed out that they were wrong. Bob Scott was at that dinner as well but I think he was falling asleep at the table.

What a surprise..... Wonder what they think is in Sage 100????

Per my discussion with the SDC architect, Sage 300 Online is multi-tenant capable now, but I am not sure that it is true.