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.
The Sage 300c and Sage 50c solutions are particularly significant in the Canadian market, and both have received cloud-based mobility upgrades to make them hybrid solutions.
Sage pledges to reverse its recent past with reworked programs, including a North American program designed to make it easier for partners to make money with Sage.
Sage sees the tighter integration with Microsoft platform as good news for Sage partners, and for Microsoft partners looking to benefit from Sage Live’s innovation.
Mistakes were made in the last five years in terms of channel strategy, Sage admits. The vendor says it has learned from those mistakes, is now led by senior executives committed to a partner-driven strategy, and that VARs and consultants will soon see this by their deeds, not just by their words.
Sage emphasized that even as it moves its technology forward, it will not forget the SMB customers who built up its business. Sage also is making an effort to pick up new customers among millennials, and to increase its presence in the U.S.
Sage says that while it is pursuing change on multiple fronts, it has taken concrete steps to deliver a more agile culture of innovation, which is already seeing strong returns.
Sage has announced a new global program for its independent software partners, which replaces multiple previous product, region and company-based initiatives, and which the company pledges will be the first of a series of initiatives which will make partners of all types much more central than before.
In what Sage is styling the first new approach to accounting since the invention of double-entry bookkeeping, Sage Live, which was developed in partnership with Salesforce and announced this spring, has now, indeed, gone Live. The catch is that it’s not live yet in Canada, but should be, fairly soon
The new Sage X3 is the company’s top-of-the-line product in what the company is no longer calling ERP, a term it has announced it is abolishing because it has historically imposed Expense Regret and Pain on customers.
Like the Sage Advisor Dashboard introduced last year, the new Sage Net Promotor Score Program makes data Sage has collected from customers available to partners to help them improve customer satisfaction, and their business.
An annual study from Sage finds Canadian SMBs are more bullish about the economy, and about how mobility can help their businesses, even though that comes at a cost of being contacted outside of traditional working hours.
NetSuite channel chief Craig West looking to add partners across Canada, and particularly in western Canada.
Sage North America announces plans for its channel program, including a streamlined tier system and an effort to make subscription sales more attractive.
Sage channel chief Joe Langner says he expects more channel feet on the street, but from fewer partners.
