The U.S. market is going to get increased emphasis from Exact as it moves the country into a list of five countries, which it defines as “headquarters rich.” Exact CEO Martijn Janmaat noted in a presentation last week that his company is primarily selling “old products - Macola, Max, JobBoss” in this country and that it needs “to come up with succession planning there." Janmaat said the U.S. effort would get a revised go-to-market effort with manufacturing remaining at the heart of the American strategy. O Read more...

Pronto Software, an Australia-based ERP vendor, has named Desmond Carroll as product manager-retail, with responsibility for development and the go-to-market strategy for Pronto’s application. Since an initial round of American resellers that were announced last year, Pronto has not published the names of any more dealers in this country. However, it has had a stream of new releases that show the company beefing up its managerial ranks to push the Pronto-Xi, its flagship product. Before joining Pronto, Carroll held several management positions at multi-site retail organizations, including Spotlight Australia and Priceline where his responsibilities included development, training, implementation and ongoing management of POS systems at store, state and national levels.

Maybe it’s just an end-of-the-year push, but programs aimed at getting customers to abandon Salesforce.com are in full bloom. SugarCRM is offering a 50-percent reduction in annual subscription fees as part of the “Switch to Sugar” programs that also provides free data migration to Salesforce.com users who move to Sugar 6-CRM. Microsoft is going the same direction in promoting Dynamics CRM Online through the “Cloud CRM for Less” offer for Salesforce.com and Oracle customers.  Read more...

Sage North America has released two services for SalesLogix Cloud customers, Managing Cloud Servers and Staging Environments. Managed Cloud Servers enable customers to utilizes add-on, ISV and custom applications for the Internet-based products. Staging Environments lets companies test upgrades, customizations and new applications in a secure, parallel environment, and review and release functionality to user. Staging Environments is available through a SalesLogix Cloud subscription at $65 per named user per month at a rate of one day per month. Managed Cloud Servers are available at charges that vary with configurations.