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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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 »

A couple of weeks ago, I viewed a webinar about Sage SalesLogix v7.5.2. I usually see a few webinars every month but I particularly liked this one. The presenter—Jason Askelson, Director of Professional Services—did a very good job at showing the highlights of the new release, providing a comparison between the previous version and the new one, giving an overview of the mobile version, and of how to ensure a successful upgrade and/or migration.

Highlights of Version 7.5.2

Here are some of the options available in the new version:
• unicode support for fields (multiple languages can be used in the same screen)
• availability of updated technical documentation for the product
• enhanced e-mail attachment handling
• new Web client features for activities, calendaring, sales orders, and sales  libraries Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of weeks ago, I published a blog post called Customer Relationship Manufacturing. In this blog post, I described the symbiosis between the sales and production departments within a manufacturing company, mentioned some customer relationship management (CRM) vendors that seem to have adapted their products for the manufacturing industry, and I also promised I would get back to you with more information on these products. Read the rest of this entry »

Take note if you’re evaluating software for any of the following types of systems.

• learning management
• POS or merchandising
• financial software
• CRM
• distribution-oriented ERP

We recently published updated ratings on a number of vendors’ products. Individual reports are available for purchase, or better you can review the ratings in-depth using a free evaluation centers trial. Here’s a quick rundown of the updates.

Knowledge Management Solutions’ KMx product, which is an integrated e-learning package, is up-to-date as of its 4.3 version in the Learning Management Evaluation Center.

Retalix targets companies with retail and distribution requirements. Depending on what your company does, you can view its products’ functionality based on our ERP - Distribution, SCM, Merchandising, or POS models of enterprise software.

Two significant updates in the area of enterprise financial software are online for comparison. One is for the Lawson S3 Finance system and the other is for Microsoft Dynamics GP.

Finally, the latest information on Sage SalesLogix is available in our CRM Evaluation Center. It covers a 30% change from the previous ratings and shows new or increased support for over fifty features.

Because we continuously update our knowledge bases with new ratings and research, I’ll make an effort to publish short notes like these periodically.