General Consultant Discussion

http://s216551651.t.en25.com/e/es.aspx?s=216551651&e=2382&elq=d0af4101c0594ab3aae0d609775170c1 If the product is anything like utterly confusing description in this Press Release, they are in trouble. Anybody have a clue what this is supposed to do?

It's supposed to convince shareholders that Sage has figured out this cloud thingy...another MVP (minimum viable product) drowning in buzzwords and hoping you don't notice that the promised v2 never arrives...

I just stumbled on this: Doug LaBahn has a new title on LinkedIn: ""Global VP of Product Marketing - Sage Life at Sage"". At least THAT mystery is now solved.

Now I see why @PeterWolf is branching out into MS CRM. The optics of this looks really bad when you are out there trying to sell SageCRM against a world dominated by Salesforce

This brings me back to the David Samuels days when State of The Art Announced vaporware Momentum. This faq reads like there is no product and Sage has only a faint idea of what Sage Life is. But it's not an ERP.

I thought LaBahn was promoted. Thanks for clearing that up Jerry.

For what it's worth, in my mind, this move by Sage is like when an old guy dyes his hair and starts dating a twenty something girl so he can look hip and cool. For my money the old dude just looks sad and pathetic. But what do I know? He has that cute young thing on his arm, right? So surely life must be good.

I read this as: Oooey gooey marketing speak with a bunch of buzzwords mixed in followed by ""we're selling direct so screw you guys"" then some more oooey gooey there will be incredible opportunities for you with a very reassuring ""this doesn't replace anything"" to wrap things up. What a steaming pile of BS.......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYXoIhUdz8Q

@BernieLehman - Sage has been selling direct for quite a while now. This Sage Lite (oops I meant Sage Life) is an application that was slapped together in a course of a few months. I don't think it's competing with any of the mid-range products. It seems like it's more of a target for the Sage 50 customers.

I still don't get the use case for mobile accounting for 95% of the businesses. Yea, we'll do sales order processing all day long on my watch or phone... Sure for a 'jobber' running around to stores, its nice and people like XKZero have had that for years, but for the masses in the 'back office', i don't see it

When I explained it to my wife (who is a CPA), she thought it sounded ridiculous. Why do people need social and mobile features in accounting? The reality is though that we are all old farts. The younger generation might want and expect this stuff. Even if it's stupid. I remember back in the 90s when the old partners would come by shaking their canes at us young punks. ""What do you need that fancy television for? Our dumb terminals work just fine."" ""it's a computer, grandpa!"" ""Whatever it is, we didn't need that when I was an up and coming accountant during the war. Why in my day, we used to ...

Social has useful functionality in CRM, and to some extend in ERP. Epicor has it and I see how it makes sense. Social in terms of mostly 'internal' social. As you know Social is integrated into Salesforce and helps to reduce alot of that internal email. It basically gives you the one great feature Goldmine had on all other CRM's and that is 'inter-office' communications about customers & prospects tied to the customer or prospect and not locked away in inboxes. But that's separate from mobile. Now call me an old fart, but personal social is a massive time sink of business productivity...As you @PeterWolf know from my facebook political rants :)

I do see the vision I think they have for this. Imagine a smaller business where half (or more )the people are out of the office at any given time. Trying to keep track of the paperwork behind customer orders and deliveries, proposals/quotes, vendor orders and receipts/invoices, and any service/production results and schedules is hard, even for a dozen people. If approving vendor orders and invoices more or less as they happen means doing that electronically and generally on mobile devices. Dealing with quote approvals and delivery receipts best require short response times, and shouldn't require a CRM infrastructure. I think we will quickly see the functions I mentioned (and more) reduced to mobile apps. So, PO Receipts as a single app, aimed at receiving people and AP functions. Simple PO approval workflow app. A functionally useful Customer Order app, and a Delivery ticket app. When you Mobilize those functions in a way that people doing the work can actually embrace, most of the accounting function collapses. Alerting about possible exceptions combined with Socialcast-like ""social media"" streams smooth out kinks. For 3-15 people, this would be very useful. The CPA sits behind it all with training on how to help them set up the flows. Great vision. But NFW Sage has the chops to pull it off.

I'm not a fan of individual apps for different roles. Too much ram, too much switching, inconsistant UI. I like a larger single app for a complete suite which is how our Connectwise app runs. It has a 'mini launcher' within the main app to fire off expenses, time entry, contact lookup, crm entry, etc.

Whatever our millennial thinking may tell us - the IRS still expects documentation and GAAP still demands double entry accounting where debits equal credits. And end users still screw up and make entries to crazy dates and struggle to reverse that mess. In my view most of this press release hysteria is meant to drum up interest. A large percentage of what Sage is now looking for is growth through new customers. They realize that their existing customer base is dwindling and they have passed the point of being able to price increase their way to long term sustainable growth. This is all hype to appeal to the check signer. What actually occurs in the office is probably a lot different than the vision outlined during the press conference.

I agree that this is really just hype designed to keep the stock price afloat. Maybe also to help pass an image of ""on the cutting edge"" to current users. For the record, the ""vision"" I laid out is really for companies with under 2-dozen, where they use a bunch of spreadsheets and the backup documentation is hard for them to manage. I do think the ""appification"" of customer-facing and shipment-facing elements of ERP will be quite common in 5-yrs. Though likely not in the Sage ecosystem.

Forbes senses a potenial 'deeper hookup'. http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2015/05/12/dating-announced-but-are-salesforce-and-sage-plotting-a-deeper-hook-up/

This is all based on an initial erroneous rumor started by Denis Pombriant who has been wrong as many times as I've read his articles. He has no idea what Sage does. Why on earth would Salesforce take a minority position in Sage? As a goodwill gesture? That simply is not supported by any type rational thought since it would also potentially conflict with a half dozen other partnerships Salesforce might do with other companies (think Intuit, xero, Wave, etc). And poor Ben Kepes is just willing to speculate on everyone buying Salesforce -- Amazon, Oracle. If he mentions enough names he may be right one of these days.

Salesforce has taken minority positions in the past in other companies. I think they have one with FinancialForce - just as one example. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I just don't see what is in it for Salesforce. The Sage customers are usually more price sensitive than the typical Salesforce customer. Just my 2 cents.

The more I hear about this the more I think it is a ploy by Kelley to buy some time. Sage looks more valuable with these rumors. I'm with Wayne about Pombriant: he has gotten many things dead wrong in the past, things that weren't that hard. I suspect that Kelley began to realize that he was in deeper than he'd thought around last Nov-Dec as he was ""peeling the onion"" on his new company. He has technologists that he trusts from his earlier gigs. Surely he has quietly used them to assess the tech mess here. No way he's just buying claims of Humanshue et al. I'd have a very different take on the salesforce deal if Benioff had gone to UK for the briefing. It's clear who the supplicant is here.

Good point on Sage traveling over to NA for the announce.

Sage is doing a much better job at creating buzz. Unfortunately we are not seeing as much on the front of creating software.

I just watched the Stephen Kelly welcome of the first of a kind, totally reimagining small business announcement, first of a kind, biggest news of the DECADE! Then you get to see the vapor ware with the first slide showing ""Total Customers"" 3,361,413 and new customers 81,771. A really small customer... followed by a very common statistic, occupancy rate, followed by the ever more ubiquitous Apple Watch dashboard. OMFG