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STATE OF VAR BIZ?: IT DEPENDS Featured

If resellers can get through the COVID-19 crisis, the anticipate strong demand for cloud products. But for right now, the services clients are are asking for vary widely.

William Vespe, president of BCS/ProSoft, said with on-premise clients with Sage 100 his firm’s ARM product  “we  are doing a lot of upgrade work and forward thinking work (reporting, optimization, and new module activity).  Some manufacturing clients ”are still operating at capacity” with work related to the pandemic, such as plastic manufacturing and medical supplies. Many are asking for AP Automation, Bar Coding, and upgrades. Cloud-based work is tailing off. Joe Noll, president of RKL eSolutions, reported some customers are putting projects on hold, others are asking for them to continue. “We have clients that are in the essential category and business is going all out and needing our assistance,” Noll said. RKL is also seeing the need to automate payments and manage documents. Other clients see downtime as a chance to revisit enhancements, upgrades or re-platforming options with Sage products.  Jim Meyer, principal of business solutions and information technology at Maner Costerisan, said most Dynamics  clients “are getting by right now connecting via remote desktop or VPN, but I think we’ll see a huge surge to the cloud after this." The firm has scheduled Cloud Transition seminars over the next few weeks. “It will be interesting to see what the attendance at those is,” Meyer said. Bob Kohlmeyer, director of the DWD Technology Group, said,  “Our network services division has been extremely busy assisting customers pivot to working remotely.” While service companies are able to work remotely, some manufacturers, not deemed essential, have had to shut down. “For some of those companies they are using this time to catch up on projects that they were previously too busy to get to,” Kohlmeyer said. The question is how long will demand remain at current levels. Wayne Schulz of Schulz Consulting is working on a pre-pandemic project upgrade. "I have some customers asking for routing information, setup needs or assisting their remote workers with getting access to portions of Sage they hadn’t used before.” Schulz does not believe the current level of demand will be sustained. "I expect that work will trail off fairly quickly as most companies are not going to start a major project while everyone is out of the office and they are concerned where the next paycheck will come from,” Schulz said.

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