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.

While the acquisition of SuccessFactors looks like a good play for investors, we look at things from a practical end user standpoint. The main question is, what will SAP do with this product? Our take is that in the short run, there will not be much change with regard to current SuccessFactors customers. However, in the medium run, we would imagine that a standard interface will be made to the SAP R/3 product offering a cloud talent management solution to SAP’s existing customer base. In the long run, SuccessFactors could become part of a suite of cloud products offered by SAP.

It is important to note that SAP has built a cloud ERP product called Business By Design (BBD). However, at this time, BBD is really geared to the lower end of the market and does not scale up to the level of companies that would have a separate Talent Management solution like SuccessFactors, so an interface between these products does not make sense at this time. At this time, SAP’s current cloud software portfolio includes a high end Talent Management solution and a low end ERP product. This means that SAP will likely make other Cloud software acquisitions over the coming months.

This will be the last post to the Software Evaluation Blog for 2011. We wish everyone a great holiday season and look forward to providing more software vendor insight in 2012!

However, it is important to note that Cloud based ERP systems such as Netsuite, Intacct, and SAP Business By Design are still maturing. They have much of the base functionality now, but some of the more sophisticated requirements, especially with regard to multi-company/multi-national environments, or specific functionality required by markets such as manufacturing and projects, are still being built. Cloud vendors are ramping up their functionality quickly and every release (typically about every 6 months) brings more robust functionality. Netsuite, for example, has increased multi-company functional depth with the release of Oneworld a couple of years ago and then acquired manufacturing functionality from Rootstock. SAP’s Business by Design has built-in multi-company capability. Workday has followed the PeopleSoft model and released a high-end financial solution after focusing exclusively on the HR/Payroll market for the past few years. Still, these systems do not have all of the advanced functionality or breadth of capabilities right now if you compare them with on-premises software solutions.

From the other side, the traditional on-premises software vendors like Microsoft, Oracle, Sage, and Infor, have mature functionality but are working to modify their technology to offer a Cloud solution. As a step in that direction, the traditional ERP vendors offer a “hosted” model that allows customers to outsource their servers and maintenance to a 3rd Party. But for most of these vendors there is still a lot of work to do to get to a pure multi-tenant Cloud solution. This development is definitely underway as evidenced by the new pricing model and enhancements built into Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 that clearly point to a future Cloud solution.

The bottom line is that for right now if you are considering a Cloud ERP software solution, you have to make some choices. You can get the technology of a pure cloud solution that may lack some functionality (depending on your requirements), or you can have a more functionally robust software solution that has not quite moved their technology to the Cloud. In either case, over the next few years, these two sides will move to their respective goals and you will see a wide variety of fully functional Cloud technology ERP solutions on the market.

But in order to really understand this product, you need to understand it’s history and close relation to Peoplesoft. After Peoplesoft was acquired in a hostile takeover by Oracle a few years ago, Dave Duffield (the founder of Peoplesoft) left Oracle and started Workday. He wanted no part of Oracle and saw this as an opportunity to start fresh with a new solution based on the up and coming cloud environment. With a new software offering, he would have no legacy install base to maintain and could develop the product on the latest technology. In fact, many Peoplesoft veterans now work for Workday.

Workday is following exactly the same model that Peoplesoft used 20 years ago in the early 90’s. The strategy is to provide a Human Resources (Human Capital Management) software solution and then move into the financial/ERP software space. Basically this product is a PeopleSoft sequel!

Workday is built on an open source technology stack that includes Linux, MySQL database, Java, and Tomcat. Because they are fairly new, they are still building out functionality – especially on the financial/ERP side. As a cloud solution, they promise (and this is included in the contract) that they will be up and running 99.5% of the time. Workday requires a 3 year minimum contract commitment and a typical implementation cost is 1.25 times the annual cloud subscription cost.

Like Peoplesoft, Workday focuses on larger companies with a stated target of at least 1500 employees. They are focusing on going after companies that have a traditional HCM or ERP software solution that would like to move to the cloud.

We are watching Workday closely with our software evaluation clients and it will be interesting to see if they will be able to start taking market share away from the larger traditional vendors such as SAP and Oracle. Much of their short term success will depend on the general market adoption of cloud based solutions. On the HCM side, outsourced solutions have been offered for many years, making cloud based software very viable. Workday should be able to make inroads into that market quickly. On the other hand, companies have been slower to adopt the cloud model for ERP and there are fewer true cloud based solutions. While this makes for a more difficult sell in the short run, this also offers an excellent opportunity for Workday to penetrate the ERP market when (and if) the market turns toward the cloud model for ERP.

Here are a few facts about Solver:

• Formed in 1996, privately held.
• Headquartered in Los Angeles, CA, with 60 employees and 800 customers.
• Microsoft centric tool; would be a viable replacement for MS Forecaster (formerly FrX) which is being sunsetted.
• Pre-built API’s to various Dynamics applications.
• Excel add-in, with workflow capabilities.
• Built-in Data Warehouse for reporting and storage of budget data.
• Typically sold through the Microsoft Partner channel.
• Solver was the Microsoft partner of the year in 2009.

Because the solution comes with out-of-the-box integrations to Dynamics as well as pre-built report templates, companies that use the Dynamics product family will benefit from the architecture of this tool and be able to leverage the BI capabilities of the software. The reporting and budgeting modules are based on Microsoft Excel and the dashboard module is based on Microsoft Silverlight; this means that users that are already familiar with Microsoft Office (particularly Excel) can quickly learn how to use the tool. The data warehouse is built on the Microsoft SQL Server platform, and is the main store for both financial and expenditure data to facilitate modeling, budgeting, reporting and dashboards. The system allows drill-down to the data contained within the data warehouse as well as data stores outside the warehouse.

In addition to its packaged applications, Solver also delivers customized BI solutions based on Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Services, SharePoint, SQL Server and related Microsoft technologies. The company works with over 200 Microsoft partners worldwide to deliver localized and vertical industry solutions to their customers. Companies who are currently using, or are considering Microsoft Dynamics ERP solutions should seriously consider BI360 as a supplement to the base budgeting functions provided by the financial system. This is especially true in multi-company environments that use a distributed budget model requiring corporate consolidations.