Sage News and Discussion

Sage Mobile Service - End of Life 5/31/15. Just got off the phone with Andrea from Sage. This is for Mobile Service only. They are planning to update Sage Billing & Payment and Mobile Sales, but Sage Mobile Service will be shut down at the end of May.

Guess that dart didn't stick to the dart board.

Hurry, throw some more darts!

@KerryEsser Do you know if this is for all versions or is it just the Sage 100 integration? I cannot find the playbook any longer in MySageSell.

They still appear to be taking sign-ups on the web. Also appears to list Sage 100 ERP 2013+, Sage 300 ERP 2012+, Sage ERP X3 or Sage 500 ERP 2012+

I can only confirm this is for Sage 100. We had one customer sign up for it at Sage Summit last year. Andrea did say that they are shutting the server down in June (but again, not sure if they are all hosted on the same server).

My 2 cents on the (presumed) Sage Mobile Service post-mortem: #1- No ability to customize, #2 - No real financial incentive to engage partners, #3 - Incomplete feature set in market with numerous mature and industry-focused competing products, #4 - Maintaining compatibility for multiple ERPs was never going to work, especially in light of #s 1 and 3 above.

@PaulZiliak WRT Wasn't #4 going to be saved by SDC?

But #4 keeps you to a lowest common denominator feature set, plus then Sage has to actually maintain the SDC for all those apps...

@PhilMcIntosh Agreed.

Ok so if we can see the concerns around SDC - who green lighted this at Sage? And whatever happened to that Sage App Store (whatever they were going to call it). Seemed as if at one time there could have been plans by Sage to implement a more structured way to purchase and presumably take a cut of third party application selling price. None of this seems to have taken off -- save for Sage Exchange. I guess we will find out about SDC in greater detail because I believe Sage talked about using it for the Sage CRM integration...

Not sure who green lighted that, but I had been told that the overall Sage mobile strategy was Himanshu's baby. As for a Sage App Store - you may recall that last fall Sage announced plans for their new X3 certified solution program. This is supposed to serve as the 'app store' model to then be rolled out across other products. Since the initial announcement of that plan there has been nary a peep about it. http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/new-sage-certification-programs-increase-revenue-opportunities-business-partner-confidence-1961139.htm

4,800 total ERP X3 customers, 14% growth - seems like maybe the X3 market is not big enough yet to attract lots of developers?

Got my call today. Mobile service being dropped. Have access to it till May. No charge. Given reason of shifting priorities......

@WayneSchulz The Sage certified developer program requires sales to go exclusively through Sage. My guess is that the developers feel they can find the 4,800 customers easily enough on their own and that the Sage seal of approval - as well as cutting out sales through any other channel - does not warrant participation.

Notably absent is any discussion of the other mobile apps and how well those are doing and any type of comfort that they will not suffer a similar fate.

The SDC concept made sense given the Sage landscape. The problem I see is that Sage doesn't understand the concept of getting market share first and profitability later. If you brought in the developers and expanded the data architecture to handle the required functionality you could build awareness and market share. They chose to limit developers to the ones they had tight control over (control is good in a multi-tenant environment) and wanted an Apple-like cut of the revenue. Sage is not Apple in any way shape or form.

Anyone have any options for other mobile service products? We've looked at IIG's Field Service and are wondering what else may be out there.