Sage Launches New Midmarket Software Suite

On the same day ERP vendor Sage unveiled the latest version of its midmarket solution suite, the company also debuted what it called a new “approach” to its midmarket business. In an effort to strengthen the company’s ability to meet the growing global needs of its midmarket customers, Sage established new international management structures and formalized an expanded partnership with global services company Logica.

According to Sage, its latest software release is a response to the increasing need of midmarket companies to manage their businesses globally. To increase its efforts to capture the market and better meet customer needs, the company established an international, cross-organizational team focused on ensuring Sage ERP X3 meets global standards and effectively can be sold and implemented, regardless of location. The new team structure includes operations for international pre-sales, global services, training, global R&D and a global marketing organization.

To further expand its global midmarket reach and capabilities, Sage also announced an extended partnership with global services company Logica. The partnership now includes the opportunity for multi-country end-to-end ERP projects covering consulting, system integration and deployment. The partnership extends the agreement signed a year ago between Sage and Logica France around Sage ERP X3.

"By drawing closer to Sage we meet the needs of global businesses and the subsidiaries of major corporations, and also diversify our partnerships with ERP vendors by strengthening our approach to the midmarket with a ‘must have’ player,” said François Sancho, general manager of Logica France.

The new version, Sage ERP X3 v6, includes features and technologies designed to address midmarket-specific business issues and requirements. Sage cites usability, rapid deployment and cost effectiveness as top concerns for customers. In an effort to meet that demand, version 6 incorporates Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud and service oriented architecture (SOA) components to try and facilitate rapid integration and deployment while creating a more collaborative business environment.

Among those components is the upcoming release later this year of Sage Enterprise Webtop, a planned personalized widget dashboard application, which can operate either in the cloud or behind the firewall, and was jointly developed with Web publishing vendor Netvibes.

The company also issued press releases with Microsoft and Oracle, touting support for Oracle and Microsoft technologies in version 6. New supported databases include Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Oracle Database 11g R2.  Also, Sage said version 6 supports Windows 7 and offers native Microsoft Office 2007 compatibility.

Sage ERP X3 version 6 will be available in most of Europe in Q1 and the US and Canada in Q2 of this year.