Is Sage's CRM Progressing Faster Than Its ERP?

This month, Sage convened their fall user group meeting in Atlanta, with some 2,500-3,000 attendees. This fall meeting, dubbed “Summit,” is intended to provide end-user training and encourage adoption, and is not focused on company news (as their spring conference, Insights, often is). Still, Sage’s president of business solutions, Jodi Ueker-Rust, outlined three new directions for the company in her keynote address, to be applied in both the front-office (CRM) and back-office (ERP) offerings.

Items of the progression trinity are not unexpected—she advocated increased use of social media, business intelligence, and support for mobile users. What is perhaps more concerning for those in the ERP market, especially for Beagle Research Group’s Denis Pombriant, is that these functions—considered the crucial elements for market growth by many—have already been implemented in Sage’s CRM, but not in their ERP.

In addition to social media unawareness, Pombriant disputes Sage’s moving their CRM to SaaS while their ERP platform remains on-premise. The recent evolution of Sage CRM is this: they use communities to build product-specific sites for ACT! And SalesLogix, have integrated social media monitoring, are leveraging outbound content on Twitter and Facebook, and are even producing product videos on YouTube. In addition, ACT! For 2010 has added e-marketing and SFA capabilities.

The criticism is that Sage’s ERP products are not progressing in the same way, but aside from the argument against on-premise retention, Sage ERP is committing no real offenses. ERP can potentially benefit from social media, but customer relations functions aren’t as vital to ERP as they are to CRM, so failure to incorporate social media is perhaps obtuse on the developers’ part, but it doesn’t mean the end of Sage ERP.

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