Sage Vision 2012

Cambodia

The Sage Vision 2012 conference was held in Siem Reap, Cambodia this year. This conference is for Sage business partners located in Asia. Siem Reap is an UNESCO heritage site for all the various Hindu and Buddhist temples from the Khmer Empire in the 9^th to 15^th centuries, including the ancient wonder of the world: Angkor Wat.

Modern Cambodia is a terrific place to visit with very friendly people and some really impressive things to see. It’s amazing that Cambodia has progressed as much as it has, since it was really only re-formed as a kingdom in 1993 after suffering so many years of the Vietnam war, Pol Pot and various civil wars. Visiting the war museum was really an eye opening experience to see the suffering that the people endured.

Conference

The majority of our partners in the region are from Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia. But many other countries were represented. Right now we are actually seeing the most growth from Indonesia. This conference focused on the Sage 300 ERP, Sage CRM and Sage ERP X3 products. There were intensive training tracks on each of these. Then there were also general sessions on various aspects of all these products.

The conference started with a keynote address that was introduced by Gee Sing Low, Sage’s General Manager for the regions, followed by Keith Fenner for Sage X3, then Lorcan Malone for Sage CRM then myself for Sage 300 ERP, and then Charles Cheng showing off our revamped partner portal web site. This was then followed by the trade show for ISVs and then a cocktail reception by the pool.

There were then two days of sessions and then wrapped up on the last night with the partner awards gala dinner.

The keynote went well; it was nice that we could weave a story where we cover the ERP market from the lower to higher midmarket with Sage 300 and X3. How we have a number of shared components tying things together like Visual Process Flows, shared connected services as well as linking to a common front office solution with Sage CRM.

ISVs

About a dozen ISVs were at the conference. They had sessions on their products as well as booths in the trade show area. Some of the ISVs present including: Pacific Technology Solutions, Technisoft, Norming, AutoSimply, Peresoft, XM Development, AcDev and iCube.

Sage provides the core ERP solution and then ISVs provide solutions for various vertical industries. To a large degree an ERP package is a development platform first, and a business application second. We provide the core applications and then ISVs provide specialized solutions for various vertical markets. Generally the success of an ERP package depends both on the strength of the core solution combined with the strength of the ISV community.

Community

I’ve attended many Sage 300/Accpac conferences over the years starting with the series of CA-Worlds in New Orleans. I’ve now attended many South African, Asian, North American and Australian Sage conferences. I’m always struck by the sense of community among all the Business Partners. Many were involved in the original Accpac Plus days. Many have been fierce business rivals for over twenty years, but it always seems like a family reunion at these conferences. Generally a lot of strong friendships and tight bonds have developed over possibly thirty years of working in the Sage 300/Accpac community.

Internet Connectedness

I gave a demonstration of our forthcoming Service Billing connected service running on my iPhone during the keynote presentation. Currently this is an HTML/JavaScript application written with the Argos SDK. At present this has no offline ability, so must be demonstrated while on-line communicating back to a server hosted in Microsoft’s Azure US West Coast data center. In Cambodia, I could rarely get data connectivity with the provider that Roger’s partners with over there, so I had to use the hotel Wi-Fi for the demo. Generally this is a no no, especially at technology conferences where all the attendees are connected to the Wi-Fi as well.

To me, it’s amazing that this demo actually went quite well. It really demonstrated that we do live in a very connected world. I was easily entering service tickets into my ERP while on the road ten thousand miles away in Cambodia. If things work here, I tend to think they really should work anywhere.

Summary

Sage Vision 2012 was another fun and informative conference. I have lots of feedback to bring back home. I visited many interesting sites around Siem Reap. I accumulated many air miles. I find all these conferences are always a worthwhile endeavor.