Pascal Houillon, the CEO designate of Sage North America, has been meeting with resellers but has not yet not with the press regarding his new role.  That’s changing next month as Sage is lining up interviews for April 29. I have to wonder if something else is scheduled to happen then. When it was announced in December that Sue Swenson would retire from the position, Sage said that Houillon would take over “mid 2011”. Read more...

SAP released a list of the new resellers it has signed – more in the last three months than in the previous year – for its Business By Design line. (I’m switching from the BBD acronym to SAP’s preferred BYD). Among these were WAC Consulting, a Sage Pro VAR that had signed six days before the conference; Paradigm Analytics, which carries Epicor and AccuFund; Kerr Consulting and Support, which handles Cyma and Accpac; and Vision Business Solutions, another Epicor dealer. Read more...

Pronto, an Australian ERP vendor, signed up three American VARs in September 2009, and nothing has been heard officially about the channel since then. But, for the record, it has introduced Pronto-XI Dimensions which ties together ERP transactions and BI analytics. Since this embeds the IBM Cognos BI suite, this possibly isn’t the product for this audience although the press release said it’s designed for mid-market businesses.

Intuit last month discussed the cost of QuickBooks Online versus the price to buy and renew the desktop product.  And the formula should work the same for higher-priced packages sold via subscription. It costs more to lease than buy. Kiran Patel, SVP of Intuit’s Small Business Group, said that over five years a QuickBooks Online customer would pay $1,500, based on the $25 per month subscription price. Read more...