Sage Summit 2011

It seem that one big announcement at Sage Summit 2011 conference that was held at Washington DC at the Gaylord Convention Center was streamlining the brand Sage across all the products. How and when this is going to take place perhaps we in Asia will be able to get a better picture of it in our own Asia Summit 2011 at Bangkok, Thailand scheduled in October.

Stephen Smith's blog about it and provide an excerps of the announcement in the keynote by Pascal Houlin's below:

Branding

In Pascal Houillon’s opening keynote, the first big announcement was the product branding announcement. Basically we have been marketing our products as things like Sage ERP MAS, Sage ERP Accpac, Sage Simply Accounting, Sage Peachtree, Sage Act!,Sage Saleslogix, etc. Now we are going to drop all the legacy product names (the MAS, Accpac, Peachtree, Act! part) and now combine all the separate marketing programs into one that will be focused on promoting the “Sage” brand. When partners are pursuing a new leads, often they will be competing with Microsoft, SAP or Oracle. All these companies have a strong brand and the customer will have heard of them. Having to establish who Sage is and what the company does puts you at a disadvantage. The primary goal of this change is to make Sage a well-known and respected company within North America like it is in many other parts of the world. The branding change allows us to combine our separate product marketing resources and launch large scale campaigns across North America that promote the Sage brand and as a consequence all the separate Sage products. Now hopefully when you are pursuing a new customer, they will already know who Sage is, and be willing to enter into a business relationship based on that knowledge. The other thing this does is help with cross-sell. Often if a customer has a Sage ERP product then we would like to sell them a Sage CRM or Sage HR product. But as it stands today the customer thinks they have MAS or Accpac and then selling them Abra or Saleslogix appears like completely unrelated products. We would rather they think they have Sage ERP and adding Sage CRM or Sage HR is just a natural thing to do.

Anyway there is a lot of emotion associated with all the individual Sage product brands, but it seems like here at the conference once people have a chance to think about these changes they see how they can benefit them.

REad all about it here at Stephen Smith's Blog : http://smist08.wordpress.com/2011/07/16/sage-summit-2011/