I was fully booked coming into the last quarter of 2014. Most of my work is Sage 100 and typically upgrades or some type of troubleshooting/special projects (new company setup, reports, etc).
I've noticed in my corner of the world customers increasingly are very much ""just in time"" in terms of deciding when to upgrade or start projects. Having a long lead time notification of when a project will start is increasingly rare. Aside from customers buying new servers , workstations or third party integrations I find users have very little motivation to upgrade.
The Sage 100 ERP upgrade is akin to putting a new roof on your house. It's most urgent when the leak has already appeared and heavy rain is forecast. Barring BOTH those events the roof is not something most people budget for in advance of seeing a problem.
It's not unusual for me to quote a $25,000 project , have the customer go completely quiet and then unexpectedly re-appear in 9 months to tell me that they're ready to go. Sometimes they don't even call but just send a check. 9 months after the quote!
Sage 100 work is more sporadic for me as customers put off upgrades due to lack of perceived benefit and no pain of ""staying as-is"".
Existing customer renewals for Schulz annual support is still fairly good. We are losing the customer who gets acquired and who migrates to another software package. Long term this is worrisome since Sage 100 is not in my corner of the world bringing in new users.
I think the stability and numbers of follow-up bugs and irritations that accompany each upgrade are long term bad news. I want each upgrade to be problem free, affordable and full of benefits for customers. Increasingly the upgrade is one where you wrestle with paperless office, apply a myriad of manual patches to stomp out Sage bugs and other annoyances that customers remember and which I think cause them to delay future upgrades. NOT GOOD.
I've had a handful of $20k upgrades back off at the last minute due to being busy, etc. (Tip: Go with 100% of the upgrade fee up front and/or a paid test upgrade -- money collected in advance in order for customer to reserve time -- be very cautious about starting any upgrade or test without at least a deposit in hand. Quote your upgrades as being for a specific period of time or you will have all the quotes suddenly become active/interested during the last quarter of the year when suddenly everyone who needs to upgrade wants it done).
The web inquiries have trailed off in terms of quality.
Easily 75% of the people contacting me via the web are moving away from Sage, are off maintenance, off VAR support --- or have little intention of paying anything except maybe $50hour billed in 10 minute increments. My diagnosis form with request for credit card info seems to work well in cutting off conversations where the user feels a need to tell you their life history with Sage, why they stopped paying maintenance, how they don't want to pay maintenance, how the old days were great when they paid $200 and had a full ERP system, yada yada yada yada).
The remainder are sliced up between unsolvable problems (""Hi Wayne we have 12 different integrations/add-ons and the VAR we are using doesn't seem to have one person who is an expert in them all"") and problems not in Sage's core capabilities.
Still seeing 3-5 inbound inquiries via the web (in a good week) with a growing percent of them being outright requests for free assistance or questions about ""can you explain how Sage Intelligence is priced because my VAR can't and neither can Sage""....
A decent number of the web inquiries now seem as if people are looking for an explanation of what they're thinking of buying and that they will not realistically buy from you but they' appreciate the free advice.