Sage News and Discussion

Hi everyone I'm at the ITA conference with several other 90 Minds members -- and Sage had a presentation yesterday which was open to anyone who attended the conference. One of our 90 Mind members took images of many of the screen captures. There are also notes that were taken which you can review. It is not really a full report but more like bits and pieces of what they observed at the meeting. According to those present there were about 50 people there. The feedback on what was presented was good. Sounds as if there's a renewed push for Sage 300 online although I'm unsure whether that is anything new. Sage as of last Summit had been talking about moving Sage 100 and Sage 300 to the Azure cloud. First up would be Sage 300. I believe (someone else please correct me) that Azure is more a platform for hosting similar to how we might use Terminal Server or Citrix. I know there are probably more differences (important ones too) however the most important thing is that the hosted product won't be multi-tenant and will still drag along the need to manually upgrade. Other things I noticed: - At Sage Summit I spoke to Doug LaBahn regarding how Sage expected to sell so many connected services when they had customers a wide variety of much older Sage 100 versions which presumably would not work with the connected services. At the time he didn't not think it was a concern. Looks as if that thought has changed (see slides). There's somewhat of a plea for partners to begin upgrading customers in earnest. - Sage 300 back with lower cost hosted version - some concerns with the 300 partners about how they can make money at this price. Slide images are in Google + here - https://plus.google.com/+WayneSchulz/posts/9Rkf8RP58ad

There is devil in much of the details and I can send the notes in evernote format or share note with those with paid accounts. For example the Sage 300 $69 price is per user PER DATABASE. So a recent customer for Sage 100 online is a single user with 13 companies. In a Sage 300 online world this would cost $69 x13 as opposed to our minimum fee of $350. Although the session was good, in side conversations I expressed that the entire presentation was delivered with Sage Green colored glasses. A few statements about the benefits of the plans to the partner are hollow compared to ignoring the reality of the situation. When Sage states that they want to be known as a technology leader by Summit, we all just chuckle.

There was also a blurb on tier level commissions. Be prepared for another change to be announced.

The mention was about one tier based upon total $ to sage across all products.

I believe that Sage is moving the tier to award growth organizations over stagnant organizations. I think it's there way of leveling the playing field so the ""small guys"" get good margins if they are selling.