Yesterday I met with Stuart Lynn and Ian Clarke – both senior development people at Sage. I would have liked to get Ian on video but he’s camera shy. Another time perhaps.
We had a great conversation with me lambasting the company for keeping so much behind walled gardens or pay to play hurdles. I sensed that by the time I’d finished, they ‘get’ that opening the kimono a little further is bound to be good for the company, its customers and developers. The company is still a tad SaaS/cloud shy, no doubt convinced that its larger customers may never move to this different environment. We’ll see if they’re saying the same in 3-5 years’ time. Which brings me to:
Factoid 1: Sage has over 1,000 ISVs in its ecosystem.
Factoid 2: My Sage sux post helped reinvigorate an otherwise failing internal blog system that Sage development had been trying to get going. I had to laugh heartily at that one.
Factoid 3: Sage uses RightNow for knowledge management in its call centre environment. RightNow is one of the larger CRM service solution providers. So…Sage is eating somebody’s dogfood on the SaaS/cloud front.
Factoid 4: Sage has been using Amazon Web Services as the main distribution method for getting alpha and early beta copies of Sage 1000 into the hands of developers. Why? It’s easy, cheap and fast. In turn, developers deploy Sage 1000 onto their own Amazon instances. So more dog food being consumed.
Factoid 5: While Sage comes from the home of Newcastle Brown Ale – nobody up there drinks it. I’m not surprised. The stuff is foul.
Factoid 6: Dealing with Sage is like teenage sex: they say they’d love to bring me in to show what’s going on but never quite get round to doing it.
Factoid 7: Remember the Sage advert that went: “8 out of 10 accountants who expressed a preference, preferred Sage?” No-one ever questioned whether that was based on any scientific sample or whether Sage cherry picked the 10. Regardless, it was the one thing Sage did that sent their sales sky rocketing in the early days. A stroke of genius or just good luck? You decide.
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