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  • 1.  Why Sage and its competitors are pushing "cloud"

    Posted 12-05-2019 23:40

    "The global Salesforce ecosystem will generate revenues six times as much as Salesforce itself by 2024, with financial services, manufacturing and retail organizations leading the way. 

    "... study finds that between now and 2024, Salesforce and its partners will between them create 4.2 million new jobs and $1.2 trillion in new business revenues worldwide.

    "And it's the partners that appear to benefit the most according to IDC with each one earning $5.80 for every one dollar that the mothership generates. 

    "IDC defines the Salesforce ecosystem as: 

    All firms that add products and services on top of Salesforce subscriptions, including not only official Salesforce consulting and ISV partners but also third-party providers brought in by those partners or the customers themselves. 

    "Professional services currently accounts for more than two-thirds of ecosystem revenues (64%), followed by additional cloud subscriptions on 19%. ...

    "That ecosystem is already four times larger than Salesforce and is set to grow to six times bigger by 2024."
    ===

    I remind you that NONE of the SF partners are paid commission by SF. They make 2/3 of their money through consulting of some sort. I can guarantee you that this is NOT "break-fix" work. It is almost all work aimed at helping their customers get more value from their expensive SF investment. To a large degree this means understanding where the customer wants to go and figuring out which of the thousands of complementary products in the SF Market is best to get them there.

    This is what Acumatica and Intacct are doing, too.  There is no reason most Sage 100 consultants can't take the same approach, even though options are more limited and the APIs not always as clean. 

    Are you working in that direction? BTW, free demos and hourly billing are NOT part of this direction. 

    https://diginomica.com/dreamforce-2019-shape-things-come-12-trillion-salesforce-ecosystem




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    Jerry Norman
    President, 90 Minds
    Smartbridge Partners
    512.419.1444 x112
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  • 2.  RE: Why Sage and its competitors are pushing "cloud"

    Posted 12-06-2019 10:37
    Not sure if you are implying the reason Sage and competitors are pushing cloud is because it’s more profitable for partners and ISVs?

    I’m going to take another guess

    I think the reason publishers pushed cloud so hard is there is no business model in selling “buy once - use forever” on-prem software.

    Certainly with respect to Salesforce one of their big drivers (aside from financials) was synchronization. Anyone remember the good old days of Act! and how much effort it took to set up a separate sync server, then schedule and manage remote salespeople who tried to sync?

    The Internet wholesale changes how and where we all work so remote access to apps and desktop environments is more important than ever.

    Maybe I’m the only one ( don’t think so ) but I have very distinct memories of driving 2 hours (or more ) round trip to visit consulting customers for 30 minute tasks. This was all before remote control software became very reliable.

    At the Sage Thrive On session they go over some of this and the TL;DR is — become specialized in a specific industry and skilled in something that you can resell as a niche enhancement/integration.



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    Wayne Schulz - Schulz Consulting - 860-516-8990
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  • 3.  RE: Why Sage and its competitors are pushing "cloud"

    Posted 12-06-2019 12:24
    Wayne, no argument with you - none of this was done with partners top of mind. However, the additional customer spends on vendors that expand the customer's ecosystem resulting in larger productivity and effectiveness gains drastically increases a customer's exit barrier from SF.

    Remember that SF introduced their force.som platform only a few years after launching sf.com. Most of the crm community thought this was nuts, especially at its pricing. Turned out that Benioff was right: this approach drastically improved the ability to use sf for lead and customer development, and then it went beyond.

    I was not aware of the 6x markup in the ecosystem before this article. Now, 6x is on the high end as far as 90 Minders go. sf has lots and lots of enterprise customers employing the Deloittes of the world with their high fees. Sage has preached since before the Kelly regime about the stickiness of Sage customers who use multiple products with Sage 100. So this shouldn't be news. 

    What prompted me to write this is that the way we get current Sage customers to do these things is to package up solutions (even if only loosely) to get their attention. But then, you must plan on consulting with them to understand how this could improve their business and what the right detail set is: this is not hourly, nor is it just a set of demos. When no longer have appreciable commissions on product sales in the ecosystem, we must think of our value to the customer much more explicitly.

    ------------------------------
    Jerry Norman
    President, 90 Minds
    Smartbridge Partners
    512.419.1444 x112
    ------------------------------

    Original Message


  • 4.  RE: Why Sage and its competitors are pushing "cloud"

    Posted 12-06-2019 17:14
    Also realize that CRM as a product category tends to have a higher level of customization than ERP resulting in higher professional service fees. CRM environments are also working with more dynamic processes than accounting.

    I also have migrated many customers with custom built apps on top of weak accounting plug ins where customers got ripped off through extremely high professional service fees by CRM customizers.

    ---------------------------------
    Gary Feldman
    President
    I-Business Network, LLC
    Marietta GA
    6786270646 x224
    http://www.i-bn.com/
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