Sage North America yesterday announced the results of its mobile device survey, which recently polled 490 small and midsize businesses (SMBs) in the United States. The Sage SMB Survey on Mobile Devices showed that employees accessed work-related information when they were not in the office most commonly using laptops (80 percent) and smartphones (81 percent), followed by tablets (57 percent).

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After engaging in a soul-searching exercise a while back, which has lately resulted with more coherent strategies in some regions, and with the recent public statement of its commitment to making customers happy, Sage Group announced at the opening of trading at the London Stock Exchange on February 15, 2013, that it has reached a definitive agreement to sell Sage Nonprofit Solutions to Accel-KKR, and ACT! and SalesLogix to Swiftpage. Accel-KKR has extensive expertise in accelerating the growth of software companies in vertical industry segments, KANA Software being one example. The investment firm brings a wealth of operational best practices and strategic insight to its portfolio companies and is a good partner to help these businesses reach their full potential.

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Sage has entered into an agreement with the email marketing provider Swiftpage to sell two of its CRM solutions, Sage ACT! and Sage SalesLogix. The sale represents one of the actions that Sage has taken as part of its strategy to concentrate on its highly profitable maintenance and development products. Read the rest of this entry »

2012 was a whirlwind year of influences on the business landscape—some of them good and some of them not so good. The fiscal cliff, the U.S. presidential election, an anemic economic recovery, the debt ceiling and proposed sequestration cuts, along with Hurricane Sandy’s effects on business are a few things that come to mind. But despite the ever-changing business landscape, one central tenet always rings true: keep your customers happy.

Sage’s professed focus has for some time been the customer experience, and the company has done a number of things in the last year to further its goals in this regard. We talked to Joe Langner, executive vice president of mid-market solutions at Sage North America, about what Sage has learned in this arena, and what the company is planning for 2013 to continue following this mantra. While Sage is a large company with over 6 million customers worldwide, many of the lessons it has learned can easily be applied to any business—small or large, in services or manufacturing, bricks-and-mortar or ecommerce.

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Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) is proud to announce the 16th Vendor Shootout for ERP. This year the Shootout will take place in beautiful Miami, Florida. The event will be held from February 20–21, 2013. For more information and to register for the event, visit the Vendor Shootout Web site.

TEC once again be moderating the event where top enterprise software vendors will present their solutions to attendees. This unique event offers a one-of-a-kind opportunity for you and your team to see solutions from eight of the market leaders all in one place. The Vendor Shootout for ERP is a great opportunity for companies looking for a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution to evaluate some of the important players.

The eight solutions being demonstrated at the 16th Vendor Shootout are listed below. The participating vendors belong to what are commonly classified as tiers one, two, and three of the ERP market. Read the rest of this entry »

Sage Group plc is a leading global provider of business management software to small and medium-sized companies, with over 6 million customers and more than 13,500 employees in 24 countries covering the UK and Ireland, mainland Europe, North America, South Africa, Australia, Asia, and Brazil. After recently streamlining and rebranding its ERP and CRM offering in North America, Sage recently announced the formation of a new organization to drive its growth across the European mid-market. The organization, which is in place from January 2013 and is led by Christophe Letellier, will be aligned behind Sage’s flagship solution, Sage ERP X3, and other local mid-market offerings.

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NetSuite announced that Matrixx Initiatives has accelerated its financial processes, improved business analytics and visibility, and reduced its IT costs since implementing NetSuite OneWorld. Matrixx, headquartered in Bridgewater, New Jersey, is the maker of Zicam brand cold remedies. After it was acquired by H.I.G. Capital in 2011, Matrixx faced a costly upgrade to its outdated Oracle JD Edwards client/server enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. Rather than undertake a painstaking upgrade, it evaluated several other solutions and selected NetSuite over Microsoft Dynamics GP and Sage 300 ERP (formerly Sage ERP ACCPAC). The company has reportedly significantly reduced its software licensing costs and eliminated its in-house servers and the need for a full-time information technology (IT) employee to perform data backup since transitioning from JD Edwards.

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On December 13, 2012, Sage North America announced the availability of Sage 500 ERP 2013 (formerly Sage ERP MAS 500). The product’s new features and enhancements, and new mobile and cloud services, aim to help midsize customers increase productivity, simplify processes, and reduce costs across their business.

Enterprises can now save time navigating processes with Visual Process Flows, which demonstrate the steps of a process in visual terms, while also including links to the various tasks along the way. Visual Process Flows were originally developed for the top of the range Sage ERP X3 product, but are now a common component in all Sage’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions.

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Sage North America announced the 2013 version of Sage Millennium, its solution for nonprofit organizations. The release introduces mobile access for all users, on-demand reports for prospect managers and directors, workflow for prospect data entry, photographs for display and reporting, and new display customization features including paging of data. According to the press release, the new features of Sage Millennium 2013 are aimed at addressing demands for prospect management and user experience. Read the rest of this entry »

Sage North America today announced the results of a snapshot survey of small to medium business (SMB) manufacturers on the general health of their businesses and use of their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Check out Sage’s infographic.

In sum, SMB manufacturers

• have added jobs,
• are more optimistic than not about the economy, and
• believe that their ERP system has helped serve their customers’ needs while contributing to the success of their own businesses.

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SOFTWARE SELECTIONS

Industrial lubricants manufacturer IRMCO selects ProcessPro Premier ERP software
Industry tags: manufacturing
“This case is a textbook example of an improperly selected ERP system that needed to be replaced. The manufacturer, which operates in a process-based production environment, has finally found an appropriate system that is specifically designed for this type of manufacturing: ProcessPro Premier. The company’s previous system was primarily focused on discrete manufacturing, and it required multiple workarounds and manual business processes. Certainly, the resulting business information wasn’t sufficiently integrated and the system wasn’t very convenient. ProcessPro Premier is supposed to fix all these issues, as well as bring new features that weren’t previously available.” — Aleksey Osintsev, TEC Analyst.

Overview: ProcessPro Premier
Compare ProcessPro Premier with other leading ERP solutions.

Internet marketing firm selects KeyedIn Solutions
Industry tags: Internet marketing, project portfolio management, project management
“Single Throw, an Internet marketing company, has selected KeyedInProjects to support the company’s growing project portfolio. Single Throw needed a solution with project management capabilities to manage hundreds of projects and integrate with third-party solutions. KeyedInProjects is a flexible, scalable, and full-featured application suite for project management, PPM, program management, and professional service automation (PSA). According to Elayne Attara, VP of operations at Single Throw, KeyedIn Solutions have ‘enabled better organizational structure and better communications,’ which will result in ‘better service delivery across the board.’” — Ted Rohm, TEC Analyst Read the rest of this entry »

SOFTWARE SELECTIONS & IMPLEMENTATIONS

Girl Scouts of the USA selects NetSuite ERP
Industry tags: Non-profit organizations
“Shifting software systems to the cloud is a current trend for organizations of many types, especially for non-manufacturing and service management organizations. Girl Scouts of the USA is a great example of such a move. Dispersed across the country, the organization needs to provide system access to all its councils, and support warehousing and e-commerce functionality to run its online store. Cloud ERP software allows organizations to quickly adopt such technology without incurring high upfront expenses.”—Aleksey Osintsev, TEC Research Analyst

• NetSuite ERP profile

Midsize pharmaceutical company Pernix Therapeutics Holding Inc. selects CDC’s Ross ERP
Industry tags: Pharmaceutical and Botanical Products, Life and Natural Sciences
“Pernix has wound up its ERP product selection with Ross ERP of CDC Software. The company’s key expectations for the new software include facilitating business growth, improving efficiency and compliance, reducing costs, and mitigating risks. Certain data quality validation processes are also slated for improvement, and traceability will be increased. Ross ERP is a software designed for such types of businesses, and is certainly capable of supporting process manufacturing specifics. See my recent Certification Report for more details on Ross ERP.”—Aleksey Osintsev, TEC Research Analyst

• Ross ERP profile
• Ross ERP vs. Infor, IFS, Lawson…

Northern Victoria Irrigation Renewal Project (NVIRP) selects Agresso ERP
Industry tags: Construction
“NVIRP is a state-owned entity that plans, designs, and delivers irrigation renewal projects for Australia’s Northern Victoria Region. It is a large multi-directional infrastructure project that required management via modern ERP software. NVIRP performed a deep and thorough software selection process, resulted in its selection of Agresso ERP as its core supporting software. The system’s flexibility, transparency, and ability to respond rapidly to changing requirements were the central points of the software selection that allowed Unit4 to win versus tier-one vendors.”—Aleksey Osintsev, TEC Research Analyst

• Agresso ERP profile
• NVIRP backgrounder

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Part 1 of this series analyzed the transformative events during the last few years at Sage Group, Plc (LSE: SGE) and its Sage North America subsidiary. These changes have led to its analyst day in Boston in February 2011, where Sage took a giant leap towards clarifying its position in the market. The analyst day started with Sage Group’s CEO Guy Berruyer’s and the outgoing Sage North America’s CEO Sue Swenson’s reports on their respective companies’ current state of affairs.

Part 2 talked about the subsequent presentation by Himanshu Palsule, Executive Vice President of Product Strategy and Marketing of Sage North America’s Business Solutions, on Sage North America’s strategic “Extend, Connect, Grow” framework and related Web strategy. In this presentation, Sage espoused somewhat differing cloud computing approaches for the small business and core mid-market segments.

But how do Sage customers and partners fit within the “Extend, Connect, Grow” strategic pillars?

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Part 1 of this series analyzed the transformative events during the last few years at Sage Group, Plc (LSE: SGE) and its Sage North America subsidiary. These changes have led to the company’s analyst day held in Boston in February 2011, where Sage took a giant leap towards clarifying its position in the market.

The analyst day started with Sage Group’s CEO Guy Berruyer’s and outgoing Sage North America’s CEO Sue Swenson’s reports on their respective company’s current state of affairs. As the summary of both leaders’ presentations, Sage remains passionate about its customers and has been expanding connected (cloud-based software) services and online solutions to provide choices. Read the rest of this entry »

I often wonder how well-known is the fact that the Newcastle upon Tyne (UK)-based Sage Group, Plc (LSE: SGE) is a leading global provider of business management software and services to over 6.3 million small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) worldwide. After over 25 years in existence and with 13,400 employees worldwide, Sage reported US$2.24 billion in revenue in 2010, and the vendor touts its 28,000 business partners and 40,000 accountants’ club members.

For its part, the Sage North America subsidiary (formerly also known as Best Software in the early 2000s) has 4,000 employees and supports more than 3.2 million customers in the United States (US) and Canada (with customers in every state and province) with enterprise applications and services that cover accounting, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), payment processing, human resources (HR) and payroll. In addition to providing horizontal products, Sage North America caters to the specialized needs of the healthcare, nonprofit, manufacturing, and construction & real estate industries.

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