Email a collegue.| Headline: | Sage completes MMS product migration |
| Description: | Sage completes MMS product migration
The star turn on the first day of the Sage Vision event in Edinburgh this week was the launch of Sage MMS version 3, a full ERP suite now running on Microsoft's SQL Server database. After nearly three years of development work, Sage mid market division managing director David Karlin heralded the rewrite as a major landmark for the company. "Who else has a complete ERP suite, engineered from the ground up in modern technology, with no legacy code, that is stable, has 2,000 sites and arrives with a good collection of developer documentation? "When I look at our big competitors - including SAP and Microsoft - they are behind MMS version 3 on the technology stack." Sage has rolled out MMS in waves over the past three years. First came the financial modules, then commercials modules (stock, sales/purchase order processing) developed with .NET and this release delivers both chunks of code as full .NET-developed applications running on top of Microsoft's SQL Server database system. On the technical side, the new version allows users to do simple things like cut and paste narrative from an email into a sales order, but for Karlin one of the most important features is that his team has delivered a "transaction safe" system. "You can switch the power off on the server and you won't get any data corruptions - that's a huge thing in the world out there," he said. From the marketing standpoint, Sage's director of accounts and ERP, David Pinches, said MMS strengthened Sage's hand in the mid-market because it could scale up from four-to-20 user sites to handle more than 50 concurrent users. In this sector of the market, companies often don't just buy an accounting package - they're looking for specialist modules to handle their specific business operations. Sage caters for this with its vertical products - Manufacturing, Retail and Construct - and may well be on the look out for acquisitions that will take it into new vertical sectors. Sage Manufacturing currently runs with Line 50, but work will start to enhance the application to work with the new version of MMS, as will an integrated version of the Retail and Construct applications. The Edinburgh Visions event is designed for the company to communicate its plans to "business partners" - independent software developers and resellers. According to Karlin, the impact of Sage's own specialist application plans should not put off other developers from writing their own applications for MMS. Pinches picked up a similar theme in his summary of the new product: "I get a sense this is the version business partners have been waiting for. It is a business partner product." |
| Date: | 06.11.2005 |
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