I have just finished reading a whitepaper from a Sage mid market reseller extolling the virtues of the ‘integrated’ nature of Sage 200 suite. Essentially this product is marketed as an all in one financials and CRM package. However the truth is somewhat different.
What you have here are two completely different products that have been developed and operate on two different platforms. On the one hand you have Sage 200 financials, this is a windows application written in .Net which talks to a SQL Server database. With it you have Sage CRM MME which is a web application (for the technically minded written in a mixture of an ISAPI DLL and some classic ASP) also talking to SQL Server (but a different database to the financials).
So what you essentially end up with are two loosely (and I do mean loosely) coupled applications that only share a basic amount of information which is of limited use! What if you wanted to write to all your customers who had bought, lets say an iPhone and you had a really desirable iPhone add-on you wanted to market to them, you could then create a campaign around that, build your offer and communicate it couldnt you? Wrong! not possible as you have no financials information you can view (apart from screen popping orders and quotes from CRM) from CRM, so there you go, don’t believe the hype!
