Sage News and Discussion

What I think Sage will sell off (given the change - aka reasonable price): MAS500 Saleslogix Value products (anything in there)

I can't remember the last time I've seen MAS500 in a competitive deal. See X3 alot though. I think prior MAS500 var's that have moved to X3 are doing 0 effort to sell new MAS500. I'd hate to be a MAS500 only consultant.

Are X3 software prices in the same ballpark as 500? Or is Sage undercutting 500 just to move X3 boxes?

Sage seems to be pricing x3 at whatever price it needs to be to win deal, including less than mas90

Interesting. A perfect case for your race to the bottom scenario. It would be a little tough for the consultant to make much on those deals.

@JohnShaver I think the var figures they'll make it on services and are more concerned about putting up a sales statistic to Sage as a lead guppy than actually being profitable. Sage is happy as it becomes another install statistic and annual maintenance stream increasing profits and valuation of the company. The incremental cost for a new X3 customer sold by a var is about .02, the cost of the bandwidth to retrieve an unlock key

And the customer gets screwed over in the process. Nice!

It's spelled l-o-c-k i-n. Somewhere on a whiteboard the Sage execs have figured out what most of the world had known. You can give your product away (See HP Printers) because the lock in and recurring revenue is where you make your money. It's even better when you have expiring keys (no idea why Sage has not made this priority A1+++ and SaaS platform where the customer cannot self-host even if they want to )

Why? They get 'cheap.' which is what most want these days. Met with a 50 user 80 million dollar company manufacturing opportunity yesterday. They admitted, the #1 selection criteria will be price. They won't even be reference checking, talking about ROI or anything else. They are on an i series (as400) and new solutions compatible with that will be favored...Needless to say I'm not going to pursue, but this is the typical ERP prospect these days. They want to finish 'demo dollies' next week and contract by 5/31 to take advantage of possible quarter ends from Infor and Oracle (via jd edwards). Sage X3 is in their also Small and large... A classic ERP disaster in the making.

Speaking of, we lost a $250k deal last week to an 11 man shop out of canada who was similarly priced to our NAV solution, but who won't charge any more for more users down the road and who charges no maintenance... I know, you are probably saying, yea and let's see them survive the long term...But it's moot for us. I'm not waiting around the 5 years it will take for that process to happen and now the sale is lost.

Plus to tag onto Mark's thoughts -- in that 5 years the customer is already bled dry and out of money....

SalesLogix is a strong enough product that if they offered it for sale there would be any number of bidders.

I've figured that Sage was walking away from MAS 500 as soon I heard about X3, and watched their contortions justifying how it complements MAS 500. Even before that, I'd heard from technical analysts about how troublesome the code architecture in MAS 500 is. VB!!?? So, if they could find a polite way to walk away from it, they would. SLX is, I think, more complicated. But I won't argue too hard with your conclusion. Sage CRM was added to Sage thru the ACCPAC acquisition. Some of SLX partners actually signed up for ""ACCPAC CRM"" before Sage bought it because of its web interface and single-tenant SaaS architecture which enabled hosted or on-prem installations. But feature-wise it was weak, and compared to SLX, it's UI was difficult. I know Sage at many levels struggled with how to deal with it vis-a-vis SLX. The big strike against SLX at the time was that it had no decent web interface. But Dublin has done a great job of building out its features. It is now more than simply respectable, and because it has become the de facto integration CRM for all Sage ERP, it is here to stay. Is there a decent case to make for 2 good CRM's in the Sage stable? Probably not. Too bad, because if there was ever a case for overspending on short-term R&D in order to get long-term payoff, it was the effort Scottsdale made to get the current web version out. It is very good, but it took too damn long, and possibly missed the window. I also think @LouisAraiza is correct.

@MarkChinsky If cheap is all they're interested in then they are only screwing themselves over.

@JohnShaver Of course I agree, but maybe it's different in TN, but in NY/NJ, this is how 80% of the prospects are thinking and no amount of discussions and powerpoints seem to be moving the needle these days. Hence the business is dying..

My one mitigating comment on the X3 pricing observations: early market penetration. They need decent reference accounts early to make the later possible. I have some sympathy with that.

@MarkChinsky It's definitely different in Tennessee. ;) Fewer teeth and more stills.

@MarkChinsky I'm a believer that the more major factors are: 1. People are not changing ERP software 2. Those that do are largely the ones with either: a. Very difficult fits b. Very limited or unrealistic budgets In the past we compensated for this because we'd have a growing robust economy. That meant we had referral sources leaving customers and hiring us at their new company. We'd also have more startups and mergers. These all required new setup of software - often on fat budgets. Now we have several areas that have changed this: 1. QuickBooks is no longer an embarrassment 2. Growth via referrals is slow 3. CPA referrals are way down 4. Fewer mergers, startups. Far fewer. 5. The web educates customers and puts them in the drivers seat What this means is we're now forced to take another look at the undesirable prospects. In good times we wouldn't even have visited most (any) of these people. Yet now because the economy is in the shitter we squint, hold our noses - and head out the door to meet with prospects who we know in our heart are not good fits. It's not a fair ""apples to apples"" comparison - or at least the real issue is how the poor selection of prospects for new name sales forces us to kiss far more frogs.

Dead on wayne.