Sage News and Discussion

Anybody catch that SWK is now plugging NetSuite? They were one of the few Sage exclusive vars left http://www.swktech.com/blog/netsuite-the-leading-cloud-erp-solution/

Looks like this happened back in October (or thereabouts). I'm not sure why Bob Scott just reported BCS as Netsuite since they are in the same press release. http://www.netsuite.com/portal/press/releases/nlpr10-25-12b.shtml

Sage has a two-fold problem here: 1. They keep eroding partner benefits which makes a lot people start eyeing the door. 2. They don't have a true cloud solution for SMB space yet and people need to fill their portfolio gap. Of these two things: 1 will keep getting worse - there is no doubt about that. Sage is cost cutting to greatness right now and partner benefits are the easy cut. 2 won't be resolved any time soon from what I can see.

Interesting. I had a conversation with Ron Eagle, then president of the Information Technology Alliance over 5 years ago and he predicted Peter's #1 back then. It was the only way for Sage to improve it's bottom line since it couldn't keep pace on the top line due to product stagnation and market erosion. We tried to keep diversified but every product we picked, Sage bought them.

What's saving Sage (for now) is that I think the grass isn't a lot greener (or as green) on the SaaS side fo the ERP fence. It's my belief that there's more than just a financial difference between selling on premises (big margin up front) and SaaS (make money over time). People buying SaaS are not buying what we've traditionally sold -- which is break/fix and upgrade/install. The SaaS buyer is increasingly looking for some niche expertise or they're seeking tighter integrations and not break/fix/implementation.

Not only that, but if your selling saas, people are younger/savyer (sp?) and are buying almost exclusively over the web. When that happens, if you are a resellers of somebody elses Saas product, good luck with differentiating and it not become something sold on priceshopper.com Unless you have ranks of decent consultants based out of a low wage country, you won't get the rates you need to build and grow a business. I'm still waiting to hear from 1 var who's making good money and growth on net new names doing a pure saas solution after the 1st deal they did which caused them to sign up.

@MarkChinsky -- I completely agree ==>> "" I'm still waiting to hear from 1 var who's making good money and growth on net new names doing a pure saas solution after the 1st deal they did which caused them to sign up. When I was at ITA perhaps 4 years ago most of the success stories of ""VARS"" using SaaS for their practice actually didn't look much like traditional vARs. a. Venture capital b. CPA firms c. People using it to offer bookkeeping/CFO type services I don't say there's anything wrong with those models. I've yet to see anyone standup and tell a story with verifiable $$ about how SaaS is taking over their business new sales stream. I do expect that the first success story may come from a company like JMT who does non-profits and where they may have enough ancillary services that the software is no longer their core offering. The age of ""we need someone to help automate accounting because we are scared"" is just about over. Nobody's scared any longer. The real need now is to make better use of the tools - whether it's on premises or off. Admittedly the on-premises is now becoming more like a managed services type playing field where those of us making the most money annually from customers are probably acting in some type of outsourced capacity or bundling in regularly visits.