Sage 100

So I'm a little dim. When Sage indicates: ""as a business partner, you will receive your regular margin on the M&S, service revenue from the conversion and installation"" Does that mean Sage is doing the conversion and installation --- or are they just saying that the consultant will be able to bill the customer for these conversion costs? This is in regards to the ""investment protection plan"" (wonder how many VP's it took to come up with that name)... http://recp.rm05.net/servlet/MailView?m=4110032&r=MTczOTY2MzQ1NjcS1&j=MjQ3MzczMDkzS0

And I'm sure it means they get to set the price.

Not my understanding. Restate that sentence as follows: ""As a business partner, you will receive your regular margin on the M&S and you will receive service revenue from doing the conversion and installation."" I had a Pro Series customer using SageCRM go through this excercise with me this summer. We were responsible for quoting services. They didn't do the work - stuck with Pro. One thing that everyone should realize about Pro Series is that it is usually very highly customized and there is a lot of opportunity for assistance. On the flip side, that results in a big bill that may stop them from proceeding.

Peter is correct - we have a lot of Pro Customers. Even though they are getting ""free"" software for price of maintenance, the services can be pretty substantial. And remember, that for many of these companies, Pro is working just fine so they feel the pending retirement is forcing them into a change they had no interest in making. Went through this for 2 years with about 500 Deltek customers. We found that the fact we were offering a solution from the same company that discontinued their existing software was a negative as often as a positive. Same thing can apply here. I might not want to move to another Sage product when Sage is the one forcing me to change? If total cost of moving is $100k and I am only saving $30k on software, I might look elsewhere.

Concur with Peter and Mike. Very similar to 3.7x SQL folks getting a ""free"" Abra license. Implementing Abra is a revenue generating project for us.

+1 Mike/Peter: It has always been my opinion that if the migration path is not seamless (meaning the customer does not have to pay a consultant a lot of money to migrate) that we should really be duty bound (assuming we consider ourselves consultants and not commissioned salespeople) to explain these options -- including when they might involve migrating away from Sage. If Sage couldn't create a seamless conversion utility then they have to suffer the consequences that many customers will look elsewhere.

For what it's worth, if customers are making this shift, we have a custom distribution system built from the ground up in SageCRM. The advantage is that using Sage CRM for your front office (instead of moving to a traditional ERP like MAS or Accpac) allows you all the bells and whistles and ease of customization that CRM offers. It handles Inventory Management, Asset Management, Sales, Purchasing, Servicing and Accounting Integration. I've only sold a handful but am steadily ramping up that side of my business.

Sage has actually worked on migration utilities, but it is a little harder than you might think because of how customized the typical Pro customer is running. Beauty of Pro was that source code was included which led to heavy customizations.

Maybe the new branding would have hidden the future pain a bit?????