Sage News and Discussion

In one of the briefings at Sage Summit 2012 Joe Langner talked about an essential desire for Sage to mine data from their customers via Sage Advisor. This data would on the surface be offering suggestions about upgrades, etc. Diving deeper it might be anonymously compiled to provide information about the spending habits of certain companies in certain regions. If they can pull this off - I wonder if on some level this could be a great profit source for both Intuit and Sage. The part that I'm specifically referring to in the link below is: Cloud Computing Yields Data Now that Intuit has 40 million customers in the cloud, Smith said, ""the next chapter in growth is data."" This is the ""era of big data for the little guy,"" Smith said, giving Intuit the chance to ""capitalize on data that no one else has."" Hugh Molotsi, Intuit's vice president of technology innovation, is working on an experimental Data Connection effort to analyze and derive value from data collected from Intuit customers. Molotsi demonstrated a program - not yet available to customers - that graphs connections among QuickBooks and Mint users to help them find customers and suppliers. For example, a home improvement company might be able to find out what areas have the most consumers who spend more than $500 per year on home products, leading to more efficient marketing efforts. It could also help create vendor ratings based on repeat business (""loyalty scores"") instead of anonymous reviews.

Epicor's retail division makes way more money on data sales than software

Great, a company's data is sold to marketing firms. Convenience of the Cloud?

When does this data gathering from a software vendor cross over the line into corporate espionage? My clients data is very, very important to them and the level of confidentially ranges from modest to the higher levels of security at a national level. If they were to get word of a data mining attempt by any software vendor, I would imagine a lawsuit, change of ERP provider and more would occur. This also leaves us VARs vulnerable in a counter-suit should it be known we had an inkling of this being possible. I do not believe that Sage could possibly assure us or the end-users that the information will be voluntarily gathered, scrubbed of specifics and only used to promote relationships or as referred to the above article ""anonymized and aggregated"". Sage can't even get their invoices out on time, make sure they're correct and not inflated/deflated. I'd be hard pressed to believe that could handle the sophistication it would take to assure a data project of this magnitude.

This is one of those areas that I expect a lot of shouting about in a few years. We're only now starting to deal with it on a personal level, with Facebook. It will be an easy area for Sage and other companies to get blackened over if they don't exercise sensitvity. On the other hand, this whole field of Big Data is likely to really change the way we think about things over the next decade.

Sage has stated implicitly and explictly that their intentions for Sage Advisor is to use the information to identify opportunities for additional Sage products - either existing or unmet needs (read: stuff that could be built or purchased). The prevailing winds in Product Marketing Management is to use Sage Advisor information to create a Customer Scorecard for Sage and the partners to use to identify and prioritize cross-sell opportunities. For CRM, I can provide this ""scorecard"" and prioritization within 15 minutes of looking at a client base but I understand that I'm pretty awesome in that regard and I could see why Sage wants to automate this for other product lines too.