Sage News and Discussion

What does 'transforming business model of delivery cloud-based services' mean??

No clue.

Yeah, those MAS 90 boxes are selling themselves! Why does Sage even have partners?

It all has to do with the elimination of co-op as of April 1.

Too bad they didn't just call it the MF program ... Mother Focus

Basically why give away all that co-op money. They get to keep it, throw a few bucks out to their favorite pets as a way to keep them loyal and increase profits

In their defense. It sounds to me that they are continuing co-op, but changing the way it is paid. They want to have us doing more specific marketing, and dealing with goal setting. I suspect that a lot of his relates to either co-op not used, and/or protecting themselves from the multi-vendor VARs. I'll withhold judgement until I see the details.

+1 what @JerryNorman said -- has anyone seen the program details for MDF? I know that I have not. I would not at all be surprised if over time Sage starts to pay a portion (or all) of the margin on renewals into an MDF fund where the use is restricted (and expires). I continue to believe it is not in Sage's long term best interest to be providing partners with commission on maintenance and then having that partner re-invest the money in ramping up with a competitor. Luckily for Sage I've not yet heard any clear success stories from partners who added a SaaS product(s).

@WayneSchulz This is what Epicor just switched to. You no longer get maintenance payments. The first X$ can be applied toward marketing & selling (i.e. salespeople), and only after a certain threshold, then it can be used against new product purchases and never cash and it expires. Seriously sucks, but fortunately or unfortunately, we don't have many epicor customers in that situation. The other crappy thing about epicor is if you pick up an orphan and they were sold by epicor direct (85% of the customers in the US), you will never get any maintenance credit or be able to sell them any additional epicor software for a margin. They will give you a commission (lower percentage) if you sell more software. That being said, their direct implementation group is so crappy, that the amount of actual service revenue falling out of the sky thanks to our strong SEO and video resource sites, is actually quite good and there are far fewer VAR competitors.

Oddly, Epicor 9 is a far more complex solution than MAS, but yet average billing rates are lower. This is thanks to Epicor direct polluting the market with lowball rates to close new software deals thus making it hard for us to increase the rates... Yes, I know, you Verasage people are about to yell at me, but picking up unhappy orphans with laundry lists of problems is not something easy to fix fee with pre-existing customizations etc, etc.

FAQ: http://cdn.na.sage.com/sagemail/SageMail/Sage%20MDF%20Program%20FAQ.pdf

Mark, my experience has been that those customers are very often the perfect candidates.

I heard unofficially that 9 out of 10 partners were asking for this change. (kidding)

I'm with John - provided you have a qualification process. My qualification is whether the customer will pay an initial review and go on our plan. If they're looking for hourly work I wish them well as I've found those customers not to be profitable or enjoyable.