Extended Solutions Catalog – Part 4
Blog by Doug Deane
Extended Solutions Catalog – Part 4
If you attended Insights, you know that Sage announced that 24 of the 56 ES titles that Sage had previously announced that they would keep, and roll in to MAS90 over the next two to three years, have been retired. That is, 24 of the ES titles that were planned to be rolled in to the 4.6 and beyond versions of MAS90, will now be given to the development community.
There has been an extended (and sometimes emotional) LinkedIn thread about this issue, and I think that it’s important to address this now. In that thread, Scott Zandbergen, VP of Product Management/Marketing at Sage, said:
“This has turned into quite an “interesting” thread, so I wanted to provide some background and further information on our decision to retire these 24 Extended Solution titles. Hopefully this will help put things into better context. Apologies in advance for being long winded!
Since the announcement was made at Insights, there seems to be a few key questions that are coming up:
– Why did Sage decide to retire these additional 24 Extended Solution titles?
– With these titles no longer on the roadmap, what will Sage do instead?
– Does retiring these titles indicate that Sage is not interested in pursuing new customers with MAS 90 and 200?
When we first published the roadmap a few months ago, which included the plan to incorporate over 50 Extended Solution titles into the core product over the next 3 years, the overwhelming feedback we received from both customers and partners was that the timeline was far too long. Some impacted customers wouldn’t have the ability to upgrade to the current versions because one or more of their titles would be “stuck” at 4.3 for quite some time. We were told very clearly that we needed to accelerate this timeline to avoid holding customers hostage. We therefore decided to shorten the ES title incorporation timeline and simplify our plans by removing those titles that had the fewest customers, and making those titles immediately available to the Development Partner community. This will allow us to focus on the titles with the most customers, and requested features and functionality enhancements that provide the most value to the general customer base. This decision did require a modification to our published roadmap (always “subject to change”) to allow us to course-correct based on market feedback.
One concern we heard at Insights was that by Sage retiring these 24 titles, it was a clear sign that we are not interested in making MAS 90 and 200 more competitive to help win new deals. This is not the case. We WILL continue to invest in MAS 90 and 200 – both from a NEW customer perspective and an Installed Base perspective. As you already know, we are significantly investing in a SQL version of MAS 200 (which will be going into beta very shortly – visit http://www.sagemas.com/beta for more details), which is primarily about making the product more competitive. We’re also going to be improving the integration with SageCRM, including support for mapping multiple ERP companies to a single SageCRM instance. In addition, we will complete our journey of incorporating the remaining Extended Solutions titles by 4.5 – that’s 25 additional titles, on top of the 7 that have already been incorporated in 4.4 Product Update 1.
After the v4.5 release we will continue to focus on those enhancements most valued by customers and partners based on submissions to our Ideas website (www.sagemas.com/MAS_90_200_feedback) and user feedback from the in-product survey. We’ll also continue to solicit feedback from our traditional sources including win/loss analyses, top customer support call generators, product and customer advisory councils, and customer site visits. We will be very overt about allocating a percentage of R&D resources towards both new customer initiatives (making the product more competitive), and Installed Base initiatives (pain points, existing customer requests). I want to be clear that we will balance these investments – it won’t be completely one at the expense of the other.
On the topic of investments for new customer acquisition (beyond our SQL release), we will work towards understanding the top necessary enhancements to make MAS 90 and 200 more competitive. I realize that many of these 24 Extended Solutions titles do make the core product more competitive, and if it turns out that these are the highest priority enhancements/features that we need, then that’s where we’ll start. To clarify, just because we’re retiring these specific titles, doesn’t mean that we won’t be able to add these features to the product as part of the roadmap. What it does mean is that we’ll be able to take a step back, and make sure that we’re focused on the TOP priorities to help make the product more competitive. Put it this way, if you had the ability to add 5 new features to MAS 90 and 200 that would help you win more new deals, would you want your top 5 picks to be limited to this list of 24 Extended Solutions titles? Or would you choose other features that are even higher priority? These are the questions we’ll be asking as we build out the 4.6 roadmap. In the meantime, we felt it would be better if we turned these titles over to the Development Partner community, so that customers could still get access to them, and not be in a state of uncertainty around when they’d be able to upgrade.
Another thing to note…these 24 titles represent a small group of customers, and while I’m obviously not at liberty to disclose the revenues for these titles, I can tell you that the revenues represent about 1/10th of the cost to fully incorporate/embed them into the core product. The point being, it’s not an insignificant investment to incorporate these titles properly – and anytime we take a project of this magnitude on, it just means something else doesn’t get done. This is why we want to be sure we’re focused on the most critical areas, and managing our R&D resources carefully.
As for those customers that currently own one of these 24 titles, it takes several months for these changes to filter through our systems and become reflected on the customer’s next renewal invoice. We are working on a communication plan right now, and expect that to roll out to impacted customers in the next month or so.
Hopefully this helps clarify things. Over the next few months we’ll be carefully monitoring the feedback we receive before deciding on specific enhancements to implement for 4.6 and beyond. As soon as we “lock” on those enhancements, the roadmap will be updated and re-published. Please continue to participate in the Ideas website, and encourage your customers to do so as well.”
In that same thread, one reseller actually speculated that Sage’s retirement of the ES catalog was somehow a “scam between the manufacturer and the Master Developers”. Nothing could be further from the truth. DSD Business Systems was just as surprised (and concerned) about the original announcement as the channel was. In the interim, we have worked closely with Sage to develop a strategy to minimize the effect of the retirements on the end-user community. Many partners in the channel have expressed unhappiness about Sage’s decision to divest itself of the entire ES catalog. I believe that unhappiness is misplaced. Sage’s decision is a sound one, and it’s based on the apparent resource drain on Sage development time that the ES catalog was causing. I would prefer that Sage devotes 100% of its resources to developing the base product, so that we can continue to be competitive in new sales situations.
Concerning these latest 24 titles, DSD agrees with Sage’s decision to release those titles to the developers. The vast majority of the ES catalog phone calls that we had gotten prior to Insights were mostly about those 24 titles. Resellers expressed a great deal of concern to us that their largest end-users would be prevented from staying on a current version of MAS90, because they were using one of those 24 titles, and those titles wouldn’t be rolled-in to the base code for two or more years. We were supplying one-off quotes for doing those upgrades, and they were VERY costly because we knew that our development time would be negated by Sage in a few years. That is no longer the case, and we can now begin the process of adding those titles to the others that we’re currently working on, and pricing them competitively.
DSD is upgrading 60% of the most popular titles at our own cost, and the end-users will not have to pay any more for them, than the cost of their previous maintenance plan. The other 40% of the titles cannot be upgraded in this way, because there are too few end-users to allow us to do that. Those titles will involve a “jump fee” which is a one-time fee that helps us recover our programming investment. We have minimized the pain to the reseller and end-user community by crediting the full amount of all jump fees back to the reseller for use in their future product purchases. The adoption of the ES catalog titles by DSD, including these latest 24 titles, has been extremely disruptive to our “normal” development and custom programming efforts, but DSD is committed to providing all of the ES titles on a timely and cost-effective basis. Many of the most popular titles are already available for the 4.40 version of MAS90.
Along with the upcoming 4.45 SQL release, we believe that the release of these 24 titles by Sage will aid all of the partners in servicing new sales opportunities. DSD Business Systems is completely committed to providing the partners with ALL of the available ES titles in a very timely way. Please contact Sedal (sedall@dsdinc.com) in our office for pricing and availability.
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Doug Deane is President of DSD Business Systems, a national provider of on-demand (cloud) and on-premises ERP and CRM software, specializing in wholesale distribution, manufacturing, warehouse management, inventory, business intelligence and eCommerce software. DSD offers Sage 100 (formerly MAS 90), Sage 300 (formerly Accpac), Sage 500 (formerly MAS 500), NetSuite, Sage FAS, Sage HRMS (formerly Abra), Sage CRM, Sage SalesLogix, Extended Solutions, and Custom Programming.
