Sage News and Discussion

Sage better keep this guy well fed and housed during Summit.

This guy is so out in left field that it's almost gross negligence. To imply that Act! -- arguably a retail product for most of it's life at Sage - was ""held back"" from development because Sage cared about partners is just laughable. And to think that Sage would do the same for Saleslogix is another odd concept. So Sage's partners are largely defecting to Netsuite and SaaS offerings (true multi-tenant) -- which implies that partners did in fact want some type of SaaS.

Denis often is pretty good ... and then there the other times. Like this. I can't help but wonder of some paid consulting was involved. ACT!, as you point out, has always had a sales-support structure like Peachtree. ACT!'s main problem is that it's very hard to figure out exactly where it fits in today's market for new (as opposed to legacy re-buys) customers. And SalesLogix is no more ""aging"" than Sage CRM. SLX Cloud for the past 2 yrs has done pretty well. Most new customer sales are using either it or its Web interface. Existing customers have been slow to migrate off the Windows app, largely because of their extensive customizations. And Sage CRM already has the API's Denis thinks Sage should publish; there's an active community developing 3rd party additions. The sData API to CRM and ERP has its own website, so its pretty well ""published."" Both Sage CRM and SLX have full cloud capabilities, in a single-tenant way. Finally, I'm gonna guess that the theme ""Sage was held back because it respected its channel too much"" is not something he dreamed up. He was fed the line.

If you are billing yourself as an analyst - and presumably selling paid research - and allowing yourself to be manipulated by PR ....

They all walk a fine line with that $$ thing. Though usually its not so much changing what they say, but pulling punches and burying less positive stuff later in the analysis. I don't think he said anything that was technically incorrect. SLX is ""aging"" in the sense that its been on the market longer that Sage CRM, sf.com, Sugar and MS CRM. ACT! has been neglected. etc. But the qualifiers not mentioned, the half-facts used (he doesn't actually say SLX has no Cloud offering), etc. makes it not terribly illuminating. And he didn't mention the two things that are driving CRM these days: mobile access and marketing automation.

Do you think Sage purposely did not move Act! and SLX to the cloud due to partners not wanting them to? That's the part I'm calling out,

With SLX, absolutely not! Partners were crying for a way to compete more or less directly with sf.com for 10 yrs. SLX couldn't really get to Cloud because it took forever to develop a decent web interface. IMO, Sage purposely didn't move SLX to the Cloud because it was too cheap to adequately fund the development effort. Period. The Web-Cloud product SLX has now is quite good. Whether it can make a difference at this late date remains to be seen. SLX once had a pretty good channel of decent-sized partners; it still does, but most now get most of new CRM rev from other CRM products, while making substantial $$$ servicing the legacy SLX (Windows-based) customers. Some gave up and became sf.com consutants, or (like Brainsell) added that consulting to its portfolio. Also, SageCRM.com has been available since Sage bought ACCPAC 10 yrs ago. My understanding is that it has never had many customers, even now.