Sage News & Articles

Sage N. America's top ERP partner, Laguna Hills, CA based Blytheco LLC, announced this week it has has partnered with SugarCRM, "...delivering to its clients the ability to effectively boost sales and retain customers, while saving money," the company said.

This week, following research from IBM that shows enterprises will be moving en masse to the cloud, AMI-Partners research shows SMBs are heading there too. New figures from RingCentral suggest tablets may be on the way to replacing PCs, while Avaya offers better collaboration and unified communications. Sage, too, has been busy and has released Peachtree 2012.

This week Zoho and Sage launch new online packages for the SMB market, Microsoft’s online CRM release is priced to suit SMBs, while US SMB’s are not backing up their data. In other new, tablet sales -- particularly iPad -- are booming.

This week with many companies looking back over the past six months to see what they might do in the coming six months there has been a lot of research into the cloud and SMB adoption. Dell has also been busy and continues its moves into the SMB space with new security offerings.

More new releases this week that will help SMBs do business and cut costs, not least of which is the launch of Google Caffeine that will see SMB websites updated quicker. A new release from Cisco offers affordable storage solutions with integrated business applications.

Following a relatively quiet Christmas in terms of announcements and releases, Version One (news, site)  has popped up again. This time  -- with the news that it is going to dramatically expand its footprint in the African market.

This follows the announcement in December that the company was moving into the Canadian market and the opening of an office in Florida in the middle of last year. What appears to be going on now is that the UK company won’t be happy with less than full global domination of the document management software industry.

Version One has outlined some of its goals in Africa, but have fallen short of announcing that they will be opening an office there any time soon. The company says that its increased presence is the result of growing demand amongst African companies for paperless office products, including document management software and imaging systems that integrate into accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

As it stands, Version One’s products integrate into a range of accounting and ERP systems from companies like Softline, Oracle, Infor, COA Solutions and Microsoft.

Plans include growing its reseller channel, increased marketing of products and investing in software integrations like Sage ERP X3, Softline’s ERP system for SMBs.

Version One already has a number of partners in Africa including Softline and Times 3 Technologies,  which resell its products as ‘bolt-ons’ to accounting and ERP systems.

Following up on their plans to bring a little Web 2.0 into the enterprise space, the Sage team (news, site) has announced the upcoming release of the new Sage Enterprise Webtop. Designed to operate on the cloud or on premise, the tool represents the company’s shift toward an all out user-centric good time.  

 The announcement by V1 Document Management (news, site) that they have just partnered with Toronto-based CA-Plus, a specialist in the implementation of Sage accounting and enterprise resource planning software(ERP) is no real surprise.

As we saw at the Enterprise 2.0 conference last week, we’re sitting on a rapidly growing pile of internal tools, databases, client media, feeds, Web 2.0 networks and applications.

There’s no sign that growth will slow or stop anytime soon, so, to help the smaller guys manage the mountain, Netvibes and Sage ERP X3 are working together to bring small to mid-sized companies new innovations for managing and personalizing the workforce environment.

“While the enterprise software industry continues its march towards complexity, we hope to bring the focus back to the user by making everyday enterprise business processes easier to manage with innovations such as Netvibes personal dashboard technology,” said Emmanuel Obadia, Sr.VP Sage ERP X3 & FRP.

Essentially, the two companies hope to bridge the gap between professional enterprise tools and personal Web 2.0 applications and content by combining Sage's business software expertise with Netvibes' personal dashboard publishing know-how. 

"Employees aren't asking for tools to make their workdays more complicated,” explained Freddy Mini, CEO, Netvibes. “Instead, businesses looking for ways to make things simpler and easier for employees to manage many different tasks at once...”

Joint development on this kind of one-stop personal workspace has reportedly already begun, and is scheduled to be presented in Q1 2010. Interested? Visit Netvibes or Sage for additional information.