More Sage Insight

I'm way behind on postings lately - lots of good stuff stored up I'll try to get out out in the next few weeks.

I've been spending a lot of time with folks from the Sage VAR community over the last several months - doing many of demonstrations of Intacct and lots of education about cloud computing in general. And I've learned a ton from them - how their businesses work, what their aspirations are, what their lives are like today, and both their excitement and concern about cloud computing.

I've written quite a bit here before about the financial model of cloud computing for the channel - the value of the subscription revenue model that comes with cloud computing to the traditional software VAR community in terms of its predicable cash flows and revenue stream and positive impacts on the valuation of the VARs business itself.

Having met with perhaps 30 Sage VARs in the last couple of months, I'm learning how they react to cloud computing and in particular to Intacct given their context - some of these folks have been in the trenches for 20 or more years reselling financial applications and their wealth of knowledge is just tremendous.

The consistent reaction has been largely amazement about how far cloud financials have come. It turns out that Intacct has lots of features built in that are either not available, hard to use or are third party add-ons in the Sage MAS product lines - some of the top Intacct features the VARs positively react to over and over again are dashboards, financial reporting, business intelligence and operational analytics, workflow and approvals, multi-entity and multi-currency support with financial consolidation and built-in contract management with revenue recognition. There was also consistent surprise at how easy it is to customize Intacct and how much customization can be done.

Where it gets interesting is when we start to talk about the operational aspects of deploying Intacct - the idea that they can build re-usable templates for a particular industry or client focus that they can deploy over and over again in cookie cutter fashion seems to really hit home. The idea of making the product their own, and building out and selling vertical versions of the applications without having to do a lot of coding seemed to be universally attractive.

Support was another interesting area. The idea that they can (with permission) securely log into their clients' application from anywhere and anytime with a web browser to help provide support and diagnose problems - since they can see exactly what their clients see, and both the client and the VAR can even be logged in at the same time looking at the same thing - seemed to really cause some aha's.

What I didn't understand going into these meetings was how much time the VARs currently have to spend on-site diagnosing problems, re-installing software and generally providing PC support, which is often unbillable and certainly low value added work. The idea of being able to do all of this remotely and collaboratively with clients just seemed to be like a breath of fresh air.

I've written here before many times and it's starting to become widely accepted that the cloud computing model is both better for the client and better for the vendor. At the same time it's becoming crystal clear that cloud financials are far better for the VAR community too - they can deliver a better product to their client, their people can be far more productive, they can monetize their intellectual property, and they can build a business based on predicable, recurring revenue streams.