To give Sage NA a little slack, this was billed as "our priorities" for the coming year, implying that the priority is to flesh out some of them. A little slack, not much. I think Wayne is right: this has UK's fingerprints all over it.
I suspect Sage will spend a lot of time the next couple of months backpedaling on some of this. They apparently have STILL not really figured out how to keep Intacct direct sales from poaching current Sage 100 customers in active relations with their partners. IMO, Sage continues to underestimate the difficulty of this.
The lack of focused "strategy" on how to deal with current mfg customers who haven't yet gone to X3 isn't going to win converts. AND the announcement of this over all strategy while being silent about Sage 100/300 means that competition will continue sling FUD at any prospect considering Sage 100/300, so NCA will continue to decline for prospects who are not really a fit for Intacct or X3.
Again, I'm amazed that Nancy T would deliver this only 10 months after a pretty successful Thrive On launch, which *almost* convinced me that Lucy had left the field. How can any non-Intacct partner feel confident about Sage after this?
Like y'all, I received a request to rate Sage for partners; I gave a "6" without further explanation. Today I got an email asking to discuss. They can't figure this out?
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Jerry Norman
VP, 90 Minds
Smartbridge Partners
512.419.1444 x112
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Original Message:
Sent: 10-29-2020 09:22
From: Wayne Schulz
Subject: Analyst Discussion of Sage Intacct
Another hint is that Sage hosted this FY21 kickoff with nary a Sage 100 road ahead session to what predominately appeared to be a Sage 100,300, 500 crowd. That being said the FY21 North America kickoff had the hint of Sage UK driving strategy vs a "born in NA" type plan.
1. There's likely no chance a large number of complex distribution and manufacturing customers will migrate to Intacct ( And who is left using Sage 100 if not the complex ones?)
2. The SEOS offering was presented with very little detail. Is this only for new customers ( NCA )? Is there a migration offer? What do the users of Sage MFG / PM do? ( those add-ons don't appear on the additional module list)? What ISVs will be eligible to run on Azure? Customers must remain on the latest release - which we know is very difficult given the 6+ month release cycle for the very first product update of which many of the ISVs trail weeks/months behind in issuing their updates.
3. Where's X3? If Intacct isn't catching upgrades of complex distribution and wholesale shouldn't X3 had been mentioned? Sage X3 was almost entirely absent from the kickoffs. Puzzling / Not Puzzling.
My fear is what largely emerges from this "dog and pony show" is a spreadsheet that lists all of your customers and you'll have meetings upon meetings to discuss who each customer is or is not a candidate for Sage Intacct. I remember this strategy vividly from the Joe Langher/Doug LaBahn days. From memory, it shook the trees, knocked down some low hanging fruit, and then within the typical three-year cycle the execs were gone and we had a new strategy.
Before that it was any MAS 200 customer with over xx users was perfect for MAS 500. I'm sure some converted but that push for migration was over a similar short-lived timeframe.
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Wayne Schulz - Schulz Consulting - 860-516-8990
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