90 Minds Community

Doug Labahn gone

Good riddance. He was an arrogant ass and did more damage to Sage North America than any other executive over the last four years with his ""vision."" He was long on ideas and short on execution. He created the big data analysis initiative of Sage customers and determined all the high ranking cross-sell opportunities available in the customer base ... none of which came close to his data predictions. He was the one that chased mobile solutions (went nowhere), ERP Data Cloud (meh), and Connected Services (mixed bag). A phenomenal investment went into these things with nothing of substance to show after 4 years. He pushed to overhaul the ISV program into a sharecropper system where ISVs are beholden to giving Sage a huge cut of their revenue for the privilege of being part of the Sage ""ecosystem."" I guess he felt Sage was the same powerhouse that Apple was and Sage could command the same premium from developers. He was a key architect behind the annual price hikes, subscription pricing, and other customer-unfriendly moves that have eroded our channel and customer bases. Sorry if it seems like I'm holding back here. tldr; Good riddance.

I was not fully aware of the behind the scenes initiatives Doug worked on, but I didn't have an issue with him as a person. I think his introduction of metrics were probably too much for a company such as Sage, because of the types of customers. What i continue to not like about Sage is the hiring of executives who don't seem to have a basic purpose, which is what they are notorious for. Doug was one of those.

I do not think this is good news for Sage Live. Also odd that a global person is being appointed for this out of North America

She speaks English.

Langer referred to Labahn as ""his professor"". Which was pretty powerful foreshadowing of Doug's ultimate fate.

Peter fleshed out my own unease about him. His performance at the 2014 Summit in the Sage 100 Road Ahead session iced it for me. He is apparently a guy who won't sweat the relevant, and depressing, details to a product strategy. I never saw Himanshu in a technical deep dive to get a complete sense of his competence, but it sure seemed like he knew what was possible and not. If he and Labahn had been effectively collaborating it could have kept Labahn in Reality. Comparing the departure announcements of the two, it sure seems like Himanshu left on his own initiative, while Labahn did not. I'm guessing Himanshu gave up on Labahn a while ago and read the writing on the wall -- then hung Labahn out to dry. e deserved it, and I suspect many folks within Sage saw what Peter saw and simply waited for the irritation to go away. I do think this is yet another effect of the ""hollowing out"" of Sage that has been in progress while the operation developed more ""fucus."" There weren't any practically experienced managers left who could push back against Labahn's Grand Strategy with believable questions about ""we can't ignore this detail, and this one, and .."" I suspect that they'll find somebody competent to finish Sage Live. But I fear there is now little hope that Sage Cloud will ever be a viable tool for our legacy products.

I'm not sure any reality has set in. Any software company that thinks it is ""executing flawlessly"" has got issues...

It's interesting that Jennifer is now over marketing for ""Accountants and Sage Live"" which implies the positioning of Sage Live.

Anyone see Himanshu is now at Epicor? I'm wondering if they are publicly traded so I can short the stock...

@PeterWolf I think Epicor went private but have some odd public reporting mechanism (or at least did). From Bob Scott's newsletter he seems to imply Himanshu is there with Craig McCollum who is running a divison. Bob also makes a sly comment about Epicor perhaps being up for sale. I'm not sure if that's just an offhand remark or a play on Epicor's history which was that the last executives fixed it up to boost appear and took it private/sold.