At Sage Summit, Sage has outlined to partners a much more detailed roadmap than it has ever done before, in order to get the partners to understand fully where things are going, to buy into the changes, and engage closely with Sage on them.
Sage delivers on the promises it made last year to invest to make its products better known. It laid out its marketing strategy here to partners, and indicated that partners need to respond by stepping up to the plate in their turn.
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Last year at Sage Summit, newly appointed CEO Stephen Kelly stressed that Sage was returning to a channel-friendly position under his direction. This year, on the first day of the summit, devoted to Sage’s partners, the company repeatedly stressed the same position – and emphasized that progress has been made since last year.
Office 365 business continues to show impressive growth, although Microsoft is impressing upon partners that the real money here doesn’t come from selling subscriptions, but in integrating it into other solutions and building their own custom offerings on top.
Making the top edition of Windows 10 available for $7 per user per month opens the doors to small businesses and the channels with which they work.
Metalogix built up a strong business on a model where the channel business was limited and basically transactional. The company has now implemented a more complex go-to-market model in which an expanded channel with practices around migration is a key part.
SAP’s channel-focused product for the lower part of the SMB market brings in new functionality from the HANA platform to add the ability to forecast product demand.
Seclore indicated that it is also seeing significant momentum from its recent OEM deal with Citrix, by which it provides the Information Rights Management technology for the Citrix ShareFile sync and share system.
Archive2Azure leverages technology from the company’s flagship solution to migrate Office 365 mailbox archives, but is a fundamentally different type of solution, designed for the rest of the data beyond the mailboxes, so companies can get rid of their legacy on-prem storage completely.
The cloud migration and DR vendor is leveraging its partnership with Nutanix and support for Nutanix’s AHV supervisor to add new customers, including ones in Canada.
While much of the event was based on emphasizing Oracle’s commitment to the cloud, they did announce a new program to help ISVs into the cloud.
CDS previously addressed downtime in installation and migration, but the new version of its migration server offering addresses the final downtime stage during the final cut-over, with what it calls its “pMotion” technology, which lets both the data and the cutover workload be migrated to new storage with no outage.
The two companies announced a broad range of Docker ready HP servers, which will be available in Q4, and a broad range of Docker integrations and other solutions for HPE, which are available now.
Archive360 says many migrations avoid email archives, and leave much services revenue on the table. Their solution is easy to use, and fully compliant with legal and regulatory requirements.
AppSense had this single SKU on the roadmap before their acquisition by LANdesk, but further integration is coming, including bringing LANdesk’s patch management offerings in for an even fuller security solution
SAP and Apigee are both seeing good synergies from their approximately two year-old partnership, the type of ISV alliance strongly being broadly pursued by both companies.
The Lenovo announcements included three joint offerings with integrators around SAP HANA, SAP-related data warehousing and memory announcements, and a hyper-converged sofolution r SAP Business suite applications stemming from their partnership with Nutanix.
The OCF found that in addition to resolving massively increased complexity in market allocation issues stemming from the growing segmentation of the market, implementing the SAP solution gave them the benefits of CRM for the first time, and enabled them to realize major benefits from going digital.
SAP Canada is thinking about dropping its one billion dollar threshold defining the direct space to the 500-600 million range, but is emphasizing that the idea wouldn’t be to take more business direct, but to make SAP direct resources available to assist partners in the upper half of the SME space.
