Sage News and Discussion

Has anyone heard about staffing activity in Sage - particularly in Georgia?

Heard Erika just got laid off.

Erika?? Not Jelovsek??

Jelovsek??

Wow. Bummer.

Shocking but she was old school at Sage. Joe Langner and Doug Labahn maybe bringing in new people.

Yes Erika Jelovsek. Am trying to get other names as well

I'm assuming this was likely across different offices of Sage

Yikes!!!!! I thought Erika had transitioned toward the 500 side of things. Was that her undoing?

Last I knew she was working on Sage Exchange and integrating between the various ERP products.

And she NEVER spoke ill about Sage.

Geeeez. I hope her severance package reflects her long and loyal service to Sage.

I learned long ago that if you are going to get the axe, you want to be in the first wave of terminations because the ""guilt"" level is highest. Subsequent termination packages become less and less. Based on how long this downsizing has been going on, her parachute will not be much.

Sage is admitting to ""a few"" layoffs.

I'm sure Erika knows about all the skeletons in the Sage's closet. She's always had great stories, but I agree, never a bad thing said about Sage. Just as with the channel, Sage has no respect for loyalty or service. If you're on the X3 team, however, you can do no wrong.

Little birdie just told me that someone in the Sage MD dept mentioned ""restructuring"" today.

Being in the midst of a kitchen restructuring, what normally happens is that you tear down the walls and then you REBUILD the room even stronger!!! With Sage, I am waiting for phase two to begin. We seem to get new architects every year who want to continue gutting the house. Not good, especially in earthquake prone SOCAL!!!!!!!

In response to my inquiry to my RSM about Erika, he told me that they received an internal announcement yesterday that there was a resource action - no names or details. He expressed his disappointment also, if this is true. That term is so cold and UK - ""resource action"".

My birdie told me some stuff too ... 2 weeks ago there was a re-org where there become 6 R&D teams: Sage 100, 300, 500, X3, Cloud, and Mobile. But part of that was the whole ISV team getting eliminated and Erika was part of that. All the lay-off happened yesterday. All of Mississauga got axed and part of Irvine. Mostly that comprises of Sage 100 programmers and QA but also the ProvideX team (they maintained the pvxwin32.exe interpreter and supported non-Sage apps that used ProvideX). The feeling from the inside (non-mgmt point of view) is Sage 100 will be in maintenance mode now (bug fixes) with new stuff being only in the area of integrations, cloud, and mobile. I asked if I should be worried and s/he said Yes. In the last year, the X3 dev staff in North America has doubled and those people were all safe. Some more nebulous stuff that needs confirmation is Sage will push Accpac on 100 customers, and push X3 to Accpac customers.

Thanks for the update @AlnoorCassim. The feeling from the non-mgt staff re: Sage 100 being in maintenance mode is not surprising nor is the '""nebulous"" stuff about Accpac and X3. Feels like there's been a death in the family...

We just received the reminder about Monday's Partner Webcast ""Driving Revenue Growth in FY13"" from Joe Langner. May include some of these new initiatives.

@AlnoorCassim by ISV program I assume you mean the push to have developers write for the Sage Payments Solutions Exchange platform? http://na.sage.com/sage-payment-solutions/developers/program-overview And certainly this cannot have wiped out all of Sage 100 programming resources. Is the remainder off-shored? There has to be some engineering and technical ability to fix issues (yes I know slow).

Yes that's correct about ISV. And there are still some 100 resources in Irvine. There is a team in India too that does some 100 too but it's been in place for awhile. I asked if the let go resources are going to be replaced with new ones from India or anywhere else and s/he said there is no replacement plans as far as they know. Wayne I think one thing you can do if you want is throw this question on the LinkedIn groups. Look at the Summit slide deck on the new features for 100 and ask if those commitments will still be honored despite the restructuring. Just a thought. Maybe even innocently ask when Erika will be communicating more with the channel on the 2013 vault. Her boss was Eric Kaas who responds on LinkedIn (usually with his foot in his mouth) as you know. I'd like to see how he responds on that.

Haven't most of 2013 already been coded? So far as I'm aware Sage hasn't made any commitment on moving JC, WO, MRP to framework and most of the road map is fairly vague on features Sage might have to code vs Connected Services (which they don't really have to do anything with). The foreshadowing of this might have been Sage's big ""customers tell us they want less features / simplification"" speech at Summit. Next year they could fall back to that same theme to explain why they aren't adding features. At some point I think hopefully people will get the message that Sage 100 ERP appears to be in maintenance mode. I would think this definitely negatively impacts the speed and quality of bug fixes to the product going forward.

Sage PR denies the ISV program is closed. I asking them to confirm or deny the closing of providex.

I am meeting with Bill Hammer and Joe Carroll this week. I will let you know what I find out!

How do you know when a Sage exec is lying? His lips are moving!!!!

The number of people let go Thursday from source in Georgia was about 50.

Hi Wayne, We have an ISV program specifically for Sage Payment Solutions, and I thought that's what you were asking about. We did have a small reduction in force late last week. There were employees impacted in Mississauga, as well as in other locations. We reduced resources on certain product lines in order to reallocate resources to other areas of the business; however, we are still hiring for quite a few positions. The ISV program was not shut down. According to Himanshu Palsule, Sage CTO, we are actually investing in it. I hope this helps.

A non answer from Sage PR

In a way, I am starting to understand what employees of companies acquired by Bain Capital felt like. Sometimes you are put on the team for the future (X3), other times the writing is on the wall that the airplane you are flying just entered a death spiral decent. Has anyone counted the number of parachutes on this flight?

If I were to read between the lines - this was some additional overhead paring where more expensive and experience employees are replaced by lower paid resources. Did they allocate more resources to other products? Probably. That doesn't mean they hired more people - just that the budget for the reduced product line dev resources is now pointing to other product(s) -- mostly likely ERP X3. Sage did not comment on the status of Providex however all their moves recently have been to bring these remote offices into one central place which frankly I don't know why they didn't start on that mission much sooner. I'm especially puzzled why Sue Swenson would not have wielded a bigger axe during her short tenure since I think that's largely why she was brought into Sage NA.

Not to say I told you so, but I've said MAS90 is in maintenance mode now for about 6-8 years. To give you some scale, the folks at Batchmaster have 200 developers. 100 of which are working on the SAP Business One edition. How many 'developers' does sage have for 100? Probably less than DSD does now.

What are the dollars like on Sage 100 vs 300 and X3 (in North America)? If they are putting Sage 100 in maintenance mode, then is it performing poorly against 300 & X3?

@MoiraGoggin That sounds like a logical basis for making good business decisions.

@JohnHoyt - thank you. I'm sure that Sage will do the opposite of logical though, what a shame.

Logic is a basic tenet for programmers, but apparently they just terminated many of those.

I'm going to put this idea out there again - back in February during the LinkedIn SPEA meeting I posed this question to @DougDeane who was also on the panel that day, ""With a large group of master developers, VARs and consultants, why don't we just join together and launch a new product?"" Doug said it would be easier and more cost effective to purchase an existing product, update it and launch it rather than starting from scratch. In light of the change to Sage 100 to maintenance mode, I'd now ask ""Why don't we band together and purchase Sage 100?"" It's been done before, different industry, but possible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Van_Lines

that Erika new stinks.

@MoiraGoggin, do you think they would price it fairly and reasonably? I doubt it.

@GaryFeldman - well it depends on how far they let the product go down and how long we'd wait...I mean if an attempt to purchase now was made I'd imagine the price may be quite steep. I agree that they'd be less than fair, especially if they got wind that a group of VARs and MDs wanted it, they'd know we'd be going from a partner relationship to a competitor relationship.

Sage would never sell. We might enhance it so it competes too well with Sage 300 and X3. They would rather let it die as they have with other products.

You don't think that they would just dismiss us as irrellevant? Aren't they in the process of doing that?

I'd ask too @GaryFeldman if we aren't aiding in that process by being dismissable. I'd rather have a conversation of what's possible. Bold ideas rather than submission.

It's their cash cow at the moment.

I do like the idea @MoiraGoggin.

It would take a significant amount of capital as well as a dedicated management team and not just a consortium.

Thanks @RobertWood. Yes @GaryFeldman it would. We are a group of VARs and our business is consulting and that gives us a bit of an edge. The capital side may be something like..we each own a percentage based on the amount we invest into the total purchase. We'd then ""earn"" based on the percentage less management fees and costs, plus our own sales and consulting fees.

Is it really more work to create a new modern product than it would be to take a dinosaur and try to make it work cross platform/mobile? Didn't Sage just recently give up on trying to modernize Accpac because there was some of it that just could not be migrated?

Are they really calling them 'Cross Sell Team'? That does not sound customer focused, it sounds Sage focused.

If there is a solid business plan and potential for sales revenue going forward for the improved product, capital should not be an issue. Look at rates on cash and the market. There should be many who are looking for someplace to put their money. Now is the time, though.

MAS 90/Sage 100 was built with Business Basic (i think I remember Soft Gold and BBX). How much does the business basic (Providex) have to do with Sage 100 being placed at the bottom of the heap?

My 2 cents: Sage 100 pulls in probably 50 to 60 million per year in annual maintenance with VERY low cost. My guess is support and the tiny programming staff cost is at most 5 million. They know that they can keep that number well above 30 million probably for 5-10 years so there is no way they are selling it without a huge price (200 million IMHO) because the value is the sheeple client base, not the 30+ year old lipstick on a pig business basic code that underlies it. If you want to stay in the var business, the better move would be for key resellers to each research, possibly even sign up for a bunch of viable competitors. Perhaps 10 in total and then powow for 3-4 days somewhere having a private demo face off/business +/- argument to see which solution provides for the best long term market opportunity. I'm ready to contribute on Dynamics NAV, SAP Business One & Epicor. Personally I'm not sure there is much future in the var business other than the few that are acquiring retiring shops at low prices or on future revenues. If you are >10 years away from retirement, its time to seriously see what new there is to do for a living as I see sticking around doing what we do today as 'death by a 1000 paper cuts' if you ask me. Plus cloud/subscription pricing is definitely going to be a growing part of the pie and the paradigm shift is the perfect excuse for publishers to half our product margins or more.

This is on the agenda for the Meeting of the Minds in February. The era of reSELLing is done. Install and break fix has small value in today's market. Its about offering a complimentary service that uses the ERP as a tool not the main driver of service. Chances are only a tiny portion of our current customers fit.

Spot on as usual, Wayne.

Complimentary or complementary?