All last year we saw this delima with Sage while we tried to work with them to become a SyncApps member for many of our subscribers using Sage CRM and other Sage financial software solutions.

Our key lead at Sage finally gave up and joined Blytheco to pursue his career, as although he thought SyncApps were a great idea for Sage subscribers, your sentiments posted here were all to real to move forward with it.

Great Monday morning read Wayne:) & BTW our SugarCRM Sync is one of the top choices today at SyncApps.

~Clint
@cazoomi

There are many reasons to be a Sugar partner. I won’t go into every one of them, but I can certainly write about the highlights. First off, and most importantly to us, we find it to be a great product. We are always looking for great products to offer our client base, and Sugar fits the bill. In our experience with our clients, we haven’t found the feature set to be thin at all. Next, we find it to be easily and powerfully customizable. As master developers for MAS90 for years, we believe in the power of customizability. Sugar’s flexibility in this area has provided us with great opportunities to meet all kinds of unique requirements of our clients. We were able to build integrations with Constant Contact, MAS90, Authorize.Net, and others in a fraction of the time that it’s taken us to build integrations with other software. We also love the idea that it can be hosted at Sugar, hosted somewhere else, or hosted internally. Each of these options has pros or cons for our clients, and its nice to be able to have choices. And, lastly, our experience to date with management at Sugar has been nothing but refreshing, energizing, and positive. None of this is a slap at any other software or any other software companies. We just like Sugar a lot. I’d be happy to share our experiences with you in more detail any time.

David

Thanks for the plug. While we do believe being with a partner friendly company is incredibly important, we’re actually just mostly excited about being able to offer a strong cloud based accounting & ERP solution to our clients. In addition, our ability to integrate two leading cloud based vendors like Intacct and SugarCRM will give our clients a great end to end hosted solution. Please note that we’re not leaving Sage or our MAS business in any way. It remains important to us. We just think this is a great addition to our portfolio of solutions.

Thanks again!

David

This doesn’t counter your point – it’s a slippery slope for sure.

Two reasons that Sugar CRM is so attractive: it has the magical buzz word “open source” that a big segment of the market gravitates towards and it has subscription pricing with a steady stream of revenue for the vendor and the channel partner each year.

Plus the folks that do Sugar CRM get $$$$$ in consulting because the “open source” nature allows for a lot of heavy lifting and the rather thin feature set requires it.

Just my 2 cents. I would love to see a Sugar CRM reseller comment on why they are a Sugar partner.

Two words — connected services.

Let me explain (and I could be all wrong in my analysis – so take this alongside your own decision making skills and form your own opinions/thoughts)

Connected services have been hailed as the light at the end of the revenue growth tunnel for Sage NA revenue streams.

Think about what’s happening here.

In essence SugarCRM is a connected service. You can make all sorts of technical arguments about what is and what isn’t a connected service. For my purposes I will keep it simple and say a connected service is anything that generates revenue to someone that’s not the core ERP product.

It’s a non-Sage product that connects by external link and generates recurring revenue.

The difference?

Sage presumably doesn’t earn a penny when an “official” connected service is connected to their ERP.

Hey BFD you’re thinking…

Ok – fast forward a year when more connected services start to roll out — when Sage Exchange pushes out (which I presume is a giant money maker for Sage).

What happens if more Sage VARS “break rank” and sell third party connected services where Sage doesn’t get a cut?

This is potentially a huge issue.