Sage News and Discussion

RKL eSolutions adds to ERP X3 staff.

I bet these guys are pulling in major salaries given how rare X3 experts are in the US. I wonder if these vars will make money as they will probably still charge their normal too low rates

I had an interesting call with Tom Miller a few weeks back and he said that there is a big push going on outside of NA where X3 jobs are fixed priced and set almost before prospects even pick up the phone. Meaning ... they know what a typical job is going to take so if you want the software, it's $xxx plus $yyy for services. I assume there is some kind of menu system or a la carte options that affect the price but it's kind of a scary thought. I'm a believer in pricing by the customer and setting a fixed price. This is not that. This is like running a restaurant or a Jiffy Lube shop with set prices for all services. The underlying current was that this will get a big push in NA and if it works, we will see it move downstream to other products too. To me, this would be yet another step towards interchangeable VARs. Even if the fixed pricing menu system is not a healthy, real way of looking at it, it would impact the way Sage looks upon the channel. But ... maybe they are right. Wayne already has starts at fixed pricing. If we all did that with the same pricing, what's our differentiator? Just my 2 cents.

I just see too many 'oh by the ways' at new clients to fix implementation costs without a huge buffer that makes us uncompetitive. And few will pay for the proper amount of upfront analysis to do a meaningful fixed rate.

I think it's worse than that - I think they are saying price x includes all this, price y includes all this and price z includes all this other stuff. No need for analysis.

It's one way to get deals sold. Whether the budget blues up later is another story. Especially with a monster complex product wih few installs and little quality us support

I find that a menu of pricing and the phrase ""the price starts at"" for [insert type of services] is fine. If Sage is going to companies blind promising an entire implementation for $ x -- no questions asked - then I think we'll see some lawsuits. This whole conversation doesn't even reflect the area where I believe most problems begin -- pre-sales. If you're doing free pre-sales then you are going to have the Epicor issues to deal with where things can potentially be missed in the initial discussions.