General Consultant Discussion

Exactly who and when did the change from 'data warehouse', then later to 'business intelligence' and now 'Big Data' occur. Everytime a name change in an industry occurs (accounting software becomes ERP, Contact management becomes Sales force automation, becomes Customer Relationship Management) Timeshare became managed services, became ASP, became hosting, became SaaS, became 'Cloud Computing'. This is just stupid http://allthingsd.com/20121128/first-saas-now-waas-bityota-moves-from-stealth-with-12m-in-big-data-play/

I tried to convince Joni Girardi at Dataself (data warehousing BI tool) to do something like this 4 years ago. Rather than make each mas90 customer invest $$ in BI technology inhouse, i suggested he develop a web based solution that pulled raw data and made it accessible on the desktop (on demand or via regular delivery) via the web. Charge either a per month/year fee or per use. Sideline business could be to aggregate across all customers (guaranteed anonymous), maybe add industry stats, and provide true comparative analysis. Too much for Joni, instead he did what Sage is now doing and came out with a subscription based price for onpremise solution.

It's very possible that Sage is looking to aggregate across all customers and sell that data. I think they'd do it now if they could figure out a foolproof way to not get sued by the customer for accessing their data. Another reason I think it's so important to have the customer sign off on Sage's EULA since there could be changes in there they may not consent to. The last thing I want to do is become a party to a lawsuit due to perceived privacy issue(s) --- in which Sage then possibly throws the partner under the bus as ""well your partner should have told you about the EULA change"" .... Think abou the history of Sage - since the Verni days - have they EVER once delivered bad news to a customer if they could push that delivery responsibility off to the partner? If so I cannot remember a single instance... This is a seemingly little thing but could be a big deal if you don't have a process for collecting the customer acknowledgements in advance.