Does saas matter to Sage?

In a post entitled Saas doesn’t matter to Sage, the author says:

Dennis Howlett contends that Sage are more interested in keeping their financial analyst community happy than their customers.  To my mind this is to fundamentally misunderstand Sage.

It is absolutely the case that they are a public company, so their financial performance is their primary concern.  But customers are without question next on their list.  Indeed one of my frustrations is that it is the weight of customer requests that seems to drive their decisions about what features to add, rather than original or imaginative thinking on Sage’s part.  So when customers want Saas, or even what it represents, Sage will give it to them.  Meantime Saas evangelists will continue to be disappointed!

It is a valid point when seen through they limited lens of what my friend James Governor might call ’self-interest squared’ where self interest dominates thinking to the detriment of all other constituents:

@monkchips clearly self-interest, squared is into the realm of goldman sachs. “self interest, shared” is more like the GPL

In order to understand this it’s necessary to think about how Intuit has changed the small business computing game by electing to create and nurture an open source community. In a stroke it plays nice with developers while expanding the potential for both internationalizing its operations and acquiring interesting new technology that benefits everyone. On the call, I said: “This will surely scare the crap out of Sage.” It won’t be a surprise to know that the Intuit people chuckled. Intuit is putting developers front and centre but equally aligned with what customers want. That’s how good things happen.

My argument re: Sage is very simple. They’ve crossed the line between understanding what customers want and what their market analyst masters demand. That is the road to hell. Of course you can always argue – as our correspondent has done, that satisfying the market requires attention to customers. Agreed. But if all that’s delivered is bloatware and almost nothing by way of innovation then Sage should not be surprised when alternatives start winning.

A good example are the Software Satisfaction Awards, hosted by AccountingWeb. Call them self serving , call them a circle jerk if you want but they do attempt to measure customer satisfaction on something approaching an independent and logical manner. Note that Sage doesn’t appear in the major categories this year:

In the accounting & finance categories, the new wave of software as a service suppliers has once again made a strong showing, with Arithmo, KashFlow and Liquid Evolution contesting the small business accounting category with the sole desktop representative, Diamond Discovery…

Aside from COA Solutions, Infor-owned Pegasus and the IRIS representatives, none of the industry’s big conglomerations made it on to the accounting & finance shortlists. Sage features in the HR and CRM shortlists, but Microsoft, Oracle and SAP are absent.

I have plenty to say about Oracle elsewhere and quite frankly SAP doesn’t need it but Sage? As I’ve said before, they’re letting the market slip away from them. If they continue on this blind man’s path then their once dominant position will evaporate, leaving them to scramble the slippery rope of maintenance. If the Satisfaction Awards are a proxy for the future then I’d argue they’ve already become irrelevant.

And to our correspondent’s argument that:

The products are known by professional advisers and are quite likely to be familiar to new staff

I don’t see that. A study of FreeAgent Central’s recent survey should be enough to disabuse any middleman that power is shifting away from the professional – at least in that constituent group. And is there any logical reason why the products should be familiar to new staff?

The world is changing and I sense a groundswell of users that want alternatives that are easy to use and produce results with which both they and their advisors are comfortable. Sage is not on that trajectory. At least not to my knowledge.

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Tagged as: Sage, SAP, Satisfaction Awards