Starting a business

Peachtree team posted a video discussing the merit of having a good accounting system on your side to help with your startup business. Sage is your business partner who want to see you succeed and grow your business. 

Check it out.

Sage MAS Community

Visit the new MAS community site which is being launched.

It will feature product specific forums; blogs; discussion board; tips and tricks; etc. 

Also, my colleagues and I will use the community site to blog all things that matters MAS. Here is my blog on the MAS site. Some day – I will attempt to link and aggregate posts from both sites.

I am excited about the community forum and look forward to seeing a vibrant community growing. Check it out (http://community.sagemas.com)

Convergence

We live in a time of convergence where examples are littered show casing various technologies or products converging to enhance end user experience. One case in point digital media and home entertainment serving to improve everyday experience. Just pick one category of your liking and you will soon find someone is pushing the envelope either bringing adjacency services closer or building one if it doesn’t already exist.

Same is true for the business software community. It remains an emerging trend to converge and deliver enhanced experience for business users.

I usually put the convergence in three categories that overtime gets delivered as one unified solution. These are:

 

 

1. Improve a person’s productivity in the workplace.

2. Improve the ability to make decision easier based on historical or projection based heuristics

3. Improve an individual social standing in the peer community

 

 

 

Peachtree 2009

Earlier we released Peachtree 2009. This release has some great features - including improvement in the Payroll, Cash Management and Reporting space.

Also, check out Quantum, which include smart posting effort and others enhancements boosting tremendous performance and scalability gains. This will be a great win in the marketplace for our Peachtree/Quantum customers.

Kudos to the Peachtree organization for delivering yet another great release in the marketplace. Keep up the great effort Dena, Katie, Jason, Mandy, Rachel, Jeff, Doug, Rick, Eric, Natalie, Andrea and everyone in the Peachtree organization.

Incredible footprint of the product portfolio – addressing the need of an entrepreneur to an established enterprise; from Peachtree, Quantum, MAS 90/200 to MAS 500 – all seeing new version out in the market place with tons of customer value enhancements, technology uplift, new modules, improved performance and scalability. Way to go team!!!

 

MAS 90 4.3 now available too

Now MAS 90 organization delivers next release of MAS 90/200 to manufacturing earlier this week. This release has several customer value features; usability enhancements; business insights improvement; improved integration; and others. It has lot of appeal and value to the customers and prospects.

One of the theme for this release is encouraging our customers to go green, save time, money and the environment by utilizing paperless office and direct deposit functionality. Now save paper, toner and postage costs, conserve office space used for storage, and reduce the time and energy spend in finding archived documents, as well as printing and mailing communications. A relevant theme for the world we live in today helping make world a better place – one small step at a time.

Like an African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” – hearty congratulations to Eliott, Scot, John, Scott, Becky, Jim, Steve, Doris, Linda, Anna, Maria, Debi, Kevin, Karen, Erika, Roberta and everyone in the organization involved in delivering another quality product to the marketplace!

What a prolific year for the MAS organization!!! Keep it up team.

 

MAS 500 7.2 now available

Earlier this week MAS 500 7.2 was released to manufacturing and should be getting generally available to the market. MAS 500 continues to do great in the market place. It is increasingly getting implemented in larger setting than ever before.

This release has several performance/scalability improvements beside two new modules introducing Business Insights Dashboard and Data Import Manager. This release also include other features, enhancements and usability improvements.

MAS 500 team worked hard to deliver this release while keeping up with the Quality goals. I am proud of their accomplishment. You know how to establish and deliver on the goals. Keep it up – Linda, Darrick, Praveen, Ruedi, Wei, John, Doris, Zetulio, Randall and everyone in the MAS 500 organization who worked hard everyday to make it happen.

 

Insights 2008

I will be at Insights 2008 next week. I look forward to meeting several MAS business partners and our Sage fellow colleagues. Time flies. This will be my second Insights conference and I am looking forward to meeting friends, having dialogue, and sharing lot of exciting things happening in our organization.

See you soon!

 

Sage MAS 500 Receives 5-Star Rating

Earlier this month Sage MAS 500 grabbed another 5-Star Rating in this year’s review of High-End Accounting Systems by The CPA Technology Advisor. The product received nearly perfect marks in all 6 review categories – Module/Scalability; Usability/User Experience & Security; Extensibility; Integration/Customization; Reporting and Support/Training & Help.

Check it out here.

Peachtree 2008

Earlier this week we announced the availability of Peachtree 2008 release. This is a new addition to my responsibility at Sage Software beside MAS products. Peachtree product development team in Atlanta is amazing and true to the tradition just released another great, simple to use product. You can learn more about the Peachtree product line here. It is an easy to use accounting product that provide deeper functionality and great customer experience to entry level businesses. It comes in four packages - basic, standard, advanced and premium.

Kudos to the team on another timely and quality release out of the door.

Mass customization

Joseph Pine was a keynote speaker during Insights. He eloquently described how various companies are tapping into Customer Experience as a way to differentiate and grow the businesses. He calls this “Experience economy” – an evolution as manufacturing and services are increasingly getting commoditized.

This thought process is parallel to what we experience in the enterprise business. Every enterprise customer needs and their business is unique. They operate differently, and have different business process needs. This drives customers to have unique implementation. They deploy enterprise products differently; customize it to meet their unique needs; integrate to their own home grown, or legacy or other niche applications; additionally deploy 3rd party modules from ISVs, etc. thus resulting in an environment unique to run their business. In such scenario, usually, no two customers are alike in their implementation. Their experience with the infrastructure is tailored to their business needs.

Also, as technology landscape continues to evolve it will further improve delivery of the platforms and architecture necessary to provide unique experience and interaction rather easily. Much has already been touted how Web 2.0 and other Social networks based progression enhances user interaction and overall experience.

Companies are investing a lot in the usability studies and interaction design to understand user experiences. TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and ease of use remains the mantra for much of the product organizations to deliver ultimate customer experience in whatever they do.

This talk also added 2 books to my reading list.

 

What’s cooking

Some screen shots from MAS 90 – BIE (Business Insights Explorer) demo that we showed at Insights.

Taking the data view ->  

and generate on the fly, configurable charts based on various filters, dimensions and more.

  

Stay tuned…

Insights 2007

May 14 to 17th, I will be at Insights 2007 – our annual partner conference. I would love to meet you if you are around.

This event is always a special event. But this year it is more special due to the recent reorganization at Sage Software. Bringing old walls down between small business and mid-business; front office and back office products should be a welcome move by customers and partners. This will serve our customers well and it should enable partners to foster an healthier eco-system.

I look forward to catching up with several of you at Insights.

Growing the ecosystem

Application grows Technology

Ecosystem grows Application

One example is Google maps. Although a late entrant in the world of maps with an established competitor Mapquest. But by opening up its APIs and encouraging it to be used beyond “driving direction” has promoted a healthy ecosystem of building unlimited solutions around geographical mapping needs.

Now Google maps based mashups are available around the world on almost any concept. Innovation is happening daily expanding the influence of Google Maps without Google breaking a sweat leveraging the power of many that grows everyday.

Similarly, healthy ecosystems around enterprise applications continue to differentiate among current players. Organization and product encouraging ecosystem that goes beyond basic enterprise need expanding it to address niche markets, new industries, micro verticals, various local/global needs etc. find itself scaling faster than its competitors regardless of the size. Key remains how to nurture this ecosystem towards delivering end to end customer experience consistent with the core throughout its life cycle.

One success factor is when organization is able to tout “proudly made elsewhere” rather than tied to “not made here” syndrome. An example is P&G – in the March 2006 issue of HBR there is a good case study on how P&G found its new innovation strategy. The Article titled “Connect and Develop: Inside Procter & Gamble’s New Model for Innovation” discusses how “invent-it-ourselves” was restricting its growth and what it did to turn around.

So support your ecosystem to spur innovation and growth needed by enterprise products to scale new heights.

MAS 90 Release 4.2

On March 9th, we released version 4.2 of MAS 90 - a leading mid market accounting solution - to distribution.

Here are the key theme of the release beside being the next generation, better and easier product to be launched in the market place.

Gain instant visibility across your business

Increase efficiency with easy personalization

Turn data into actionable knowledge

Achieve higher productivity

Sage MAS 90 and MAS 200 works the way you do

Manage your customer relationships the way you want to

Congratulations to everyone across our various organizations who worked on this release. Thank you for your dedication and hard work towards getting this release out of the door.