Posted by admin on January 13, 2012 under CRM Software, ERP Software | 
Sage North America recently announced that they are renaming many of their software products in order to increase awareness of the Sage brand. Although one of the largest software companies in the world, they found that when they did surveys, the individual software product names Sage sold were more recognizable than the general Sage brand. Like almost all of the other major mid-market ERP software vendors, Sage has acquired a number of software products over the past 15 years, but each solution has remained somewhat autonomous.
This move in North America now more closely parallels the Sage naming conventions in Europe. The goal of the changes is really twofold: 1) They want to increase awareness of the Sage name, and 2) They want to show scalability and where each product fits in the market – The lower the number, the less complex and geared to smaller companies – the higher the number the more sophisticated and focused on larger companies. They are also increasing integration of their general ERP products to their niche and stand-alone CRM, Fixed Assets, HR and Payroll solutions.
The following is a high-level guide to the new names for some of their major products:
Peachtree = Sage 50 US Edition (with various industry specific templates)
Simply Accounting = Sage 50 Canadian Edition (with various industry specific templates)
MAS 90 = Sage 100 Standard ERP
MAS 200 = Sage 100 Advanced ERP
Master Builder = Sage 100 Contractor
Accpac = Sage 300 ERP
Timberline = Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate
MAS 500 = Sage 500 ERP
Sage ERP X3 = Sage ERP X3
FAS = Sage Fixed Assets
The complete list can be found here: http://www.sagenorthamerica.com/Company/Brand/Sage-Product-Name-Grid
The bottom line is that until these new names become more recognized in the market, if you are considering a Sage solution you should be very careful to identify the specific product you are looking at. While it is helpful to see scalability of the software solutions more clearly with the 50, 100, 300, and 500 levels, the name changes make the products appear to be the same, when in reality they are completely different products with different code bases. In fact, some completely different products now have the same name. (Peachtree and Simply Accounting are both now known as Sage 50 and there is another Sage 50 software product in Europe). So make sure that you clearly understand which product you are talking about with the Sage salesperson or Sage Partner that you are working with.
Posted by admin on June 9, 2011 under CRM Software, ERP Software, Government Software, Non-Profit Software, Retail Software |
SAGE is a major ERP global player and one of the largest ERP vendors in the world. While it is a major player, SAGE has struggled with marketing their products and brand and is not as well known in the US. They have also struggled with product direction and focus as they have many different products both in the US and Europe. The SAGE software products are mostly sold through a Value Added Reseller channel, although they do sell direct depending on the product and situation. In the past they have taken more of a regional approach – with certain products focused on the North American market and other products in Europe. They are squarely focused on the mid to lower market for software solutions.
SAGE has acquired many software solutions over the years – including State of the Art in the US in 1998 (MAS 90 and MAS 500). Here is a partial listing of the products that SAGE sells in the US. You will probably recognize the names and may be surprised that they are owned by SAGE:
X3 (Formerly Adonix) – ERP
Accpac – ERP
MAS 90 – ERP
MAS 500 – ERP
Timberline – Construction/Property Management
MIP – Non-Profit
Peachtree – Small Office Accounting
ABRA – HR
BEST FAS – Fixed Assets
Saleslogix – CRM
Many others…
One product that has reached a couple of Short List’s recently in our software selection projects is the SAGE X3 product. This is a multi-national manufacturing focused software solution and is the former Adonix product that was acquired by SAGE in 2005. Adonix was originally developed in France and offers a robust accounting/manufacturing solution. It is interesting to note that the CEO of SAGE is Guy Berruyer who led the French SAGE operation. They also recently installed Pascal Houillon as the CEO of SAGE North America – who also came from the French operation. We think these moves point to a future emphasis on the X3 product at SAGE, and may even lead to X3 becoming the flagship product for SAGE on a worldwide basis.
Posted by admin on January 21, 2011 under CRM Software |
Microsoft just announced the worldwide release of Dynamics CRM Online. It will be available in 40 countries and 41 languages. With Steve Ballmer announcing the release, Microsoft clearly views this as one of the bigger steps to Microsoft entering the cloud market. To introduce Dynamics CRM Online, they are targeting a low introductory rate of less than $35/user/month for the first 12 months which compares to $125/user/month average cost for Salesforce.com.
While there are many online CRM software solutions available in the market, this product’s target is obviously Salesforce.com which has the largest market share for cloud CRM solutions. Salesforce was one of the first to the cloud with CRM about 10 years ago. They were lucky enough to find that cloud solutions were very accepted in the CRM space and have grown tremendously over the past decade. ERP has not found the wide acceptance for cloud solutions yet, but that is slowly changing and the subject of another post.
I haven’t seen much of the new software, but I did catch a little web demo they have on their site and saw their trusty bicycle demo example. (Microsoft’s standard demo data is a bicycle manufacturing shop.) As with all of their other Dynamics ERP solutions, they have the Office 2010 “Ribbon” concept. I would imagine that much of the functionality would match the Dynamics CRM on-premise solution – which is actually a fairly robust CRM solution.
Will Microsoft be successful? I believe in the long run they will. Will they topple Salesforce.com? Probably not, but they will give them some very interesting competition. Salesforce.com has many years and a ton of clients that are using the software. They have also been very adept at innovation and developed their Force.com development environment, which enables companies to develop add-0n software to the salesforce product. This has created a very nice ec0-system for Salesforce to move forward. They have also recently entered the ERP space with the Financial Force product, but they have a limited number of installations with that product.
Microsoft has a lot of ERP and on-premise CRM implementations in their install base. They have thousands of Value Added Resellers (VAR) and Independent Software Vendors (ISV) that work the Dynamics line. They have the money to be patient as they build up the install base. They have the tools and the infrastructure for success with Dynamics CRM Online.
