In a recent Information Week ‘gripe’ article, Ed Foster reports that US users of Peachtree and Quickbooks are being forced onto Windows from Linux when they upgrade to current product versions. This is adding cost and creating complications:
The upshot is the reader’s clients first had to upgrade their accounting package and then had to spend extra money to continue using it. “In both cases the software developers are forcing my clients to use server software we had decided would be unnecessary and would add to their costs,” the reader wrote.
Ed believes it’s a Microsoft conspiracy. Isn’t it always when stuff like this happens? No. Developers make informed decisions about these things so I point the finger at Sage/Intuit. I took this up with Klaus-Michael Vogelberg, CTO at Sage who agreed that:
We don’t have proper support for Linux in our SMB applications at the moment.
That led on to a discussion which is mirrored in the comments to Ed’s piece. Look for Linux alternatives. I’d never heard of those cited like WebERP and Quasar. That’s hardly surprising as they’re Canadian offerings. But then neither inspired a lot of confidence when I ran the demos.
The upshot is that in Sage’s case, they’re caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand Sage is committed to MySQL as the preferred database across all applications. But they’re caught in a .NET environment for many of the applications.
Paul Stobart, Sage UK CEO knows this is a costly problem because it was something which he was at pains to explain at the recent Sage Connections conference. As yet, Sage has not taken the step of grasping the nettle and moving development to LAMP. Klaus-Michael suggested the mid-market is more receptive to the idea of a switch than SMBs. SMBs don’t care but I can understand why mid-market organisations with established IT would take the LAMP message to heart. It gives them more bang per buck,.
Curiously, the mid-market is one segment where Sage has struggled the most and yet where I see significant potential and where Sage could make a handsome living. But when you’re enamoured of your premium cash cow brand, it is hard to listen beyond the ringing tones of the cash register.
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