Sage Head for the Cloud (again) – with CRM
On September 17th, 2009 by Duane Jackson
It’s good to hear Sage haven’t been scared away from SaaS and the cloud after Sage Live, their aborted attempt at a web-based accounting app.
They’ve announced that their SalesLogix CRM system will be available as a web-based offering by early in 2010.
They say it’s a full-featured, ‘single-tenant’ cloud edition of Sage SalesLogix. It’s a positive sign that they’re using “proper” cloud technologies, like Amazon EC2, to deliver the product. Their problems around Sage Live were irresolvable because they’d used an unsuitable middleware product (which they didn’t own) to deliver the application.
One big problem though. Single tenant? One of the biggest benefits of the SaaS model is that the software is multi-tenanted.
A “single tenant” system means there is an installation of the software for each customer. Indeed, Sage say that users can choose when to trigger an upgrade to the vlatest ersion of SalesLogix, rather than have Sage automatically upgrade them (what’s the betting this will be chargeable too?).
As well as not being ideal for the customer, it also creates problems for Sage themselves. This model of delivering software over the internet simply isn’t scalable, nor does it allow them to take advantage of (and reflect in their pricing) the ability to easily support the software knowing that everyone is running the same code.
All in all, it sounds like they’ll make a better go of it than they did with Sage Live. But it’s still a flawed strategy. For proper web-based CRM, see our partners here.
Perhaps by their 3rd attempt at getting into the cloud Sage wll finally grasp the concept in full.
Update: Good to see Philip Carnelley at TechMarketView agrees with me on the multi-ternnancy issue aswell as making some other very valid points. A saner person would argue that it’s me agreeing with him as he published way before me and our post titles are rather similar - but I swear I’ve only just read it!
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Tags: Amazon EC3, Cloud Computing, CRM, SaaS, Sage, saleslogix
September 17th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Actually, this very well be a great idea that could be a threat to the Saas world.
Multi-tenant environments do not allow each customer to configure the environment to their own performance needs. Customizations are also difficult if not impossible for individual customers. The single tenant model does not imply that Sage will be caring for each of the customers (with different code). Any business partner can access these systems just as they would any system accessed via Terminal server.
Oh, and my understanding is that there will be no “setup”. They purchase and their single tenant environment is setup on the fly. It could be very cool.
September 17th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Hi Mike,
I guess you’re not a KashFlow user? It’s very easy, using a multi-tenanted, written-for-SaaS application to configure it all for each customers needs. You just make stuff off-and-onable.
I’m not sure I follow why single-tenant doesn’t imply separate installations to care for. And if Terminal Services comes into the equiation it certainly isn’t SaaS by most peoples definitions! See The Touring Test
September 21st, 2009 at 3:18 pm
Your blog has obviously led to a massive amount of traffic to the SalesLogix site, as it is now down…..
“The server has experienced an error. Try again or contact your portal administrator if you continue experiencing problems.”
http://www.sagecrmsolutions.com/products/sagesaleslogix
September 23rd, 2009 at 8:16 am
[...] But web-based applications, or “SaaS – Software as a Service” solutions, can serve lots and lots of customers without the need for additional servers (unless you follow Sage’s Stupid-as-a-Service strategy). [...]
September 28th, 2009 at 9:07 am
The difference this time around is that SalesLogix is a product that has been web-enabled for some time so rolling it out as a SaaS offering is much easier than the SageLive which was a new product built, lets face it, rather poorly.
The issue I see it is that the CRM market is way more fragmented than the financials market is. There are literally hundreds of offerings many of which are web-based and it will be just another hat in ring. Sage’s biggest triumph would be to have integrated CRM and Financials but that isn’t going to happen any time soon because Sage 50 and 200 are still traditional windows apps.
Gary
October 2nd, 2009 at 12:04 pm
@Mike – years ago I worked for a company who sold a “SaaS” application (before the term was coined, or certainly before it was popularised).
It was, however, single-tenanted, which frankly was the downfall of the software and to some extent the company (in the years since it has been bought at least twice, chopped up, passed around, etc – product still exists, but the company has been making a loss for years).
The overheads involved are just killer in many cases, whereas multi-tenanted applications offer good profitability, which ultimately is better for the end user as more cash is available for reinvestment into the product!