Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If you have a lot of e-commerce customers, does that mean you are building in the capabilities of running a full e-commerce shopping cart, for example, into your portfolio?

Joe Langner: With the number of customers we have and the time we have been on the market, we either produce those capabilities ourselves from our core products, or we work with business partners who complement some of those additional features.  Shopping carts, web stores, e-buildings, or digital signatures are using technology to automate processes.

SM: We are at point of evolution in this industry where some of those categories have small companies with sizable customer bases – Bigcommerce or Magento, for example.  Those could be reasonable acquisition targets for you.

JL: We are always looking at [possible] partners.  If it is part of the core of the way the system works, if there is high dependency on integration, then we typically build it. If it serves the need of a specific protocol, then we tend to partner. Sometimes you make a trade-off when you want to bring the product to the market faster and realize you can only develop a limited number of products, so perhaps you extend some of the capabilities while you are still building. For e-commerce and stores, we have partnerships with companies that use our API. Just before this call I was with a company called L Tech that does the electronic documentation management component so that you can receive a paper invoice, turn it into [a digital form] and integrate it into your accounting. We do that. But our focus is mainly the complete solution. If there is a gap in functionality, we either build it or partner with somebody who can do it.

SM: I was also talking about the way you complete the functionality. The same way you talked about an integrated type of functionality for an e-commerce company, such as the shopping cart or the catalog platform, which are the ERP [features] of an e-commerce company. If you claim you want to provide a one-stop shop as opposed to multiple-point solutions, then those should be part of your product strategy.

JL: They definitely are.

SM: Based on where you sit today, what kinds of open problems do you see in any of these areas – mobile, social, cloud – that your customers are trying to find solutions to but cannot?

JL: The most common problem we see in companies that are looking to adopt future technology is the fact, that what there is on the market today are partial solutions versus solving the business problem. Although there are thousands of applications being built today, most of them are independent from the others systems that the companies use. They tend to be information-based applications – like a dashboard of information – versus a tool you can use to get the job done.

When email become available to the smartphone device, a lot of people said, “I am going to check my email on the phone, but I don’t want it to leave the server.” Subconsciously they wanted to go back to their computers because that was their source of record. That thought lasted only six months until everyone realized that that was a waste of time. They wanted to just check their emails on their phones, iPads, or computers, and when they delete a message, it is gone completely. The concept of leveraging these devices to get work done is where we still see a big opportunity. We would ask, “How are you communicating with your inside sales force or with the inventory that is in your warehouses?”

Taxes are also a big problem for people. If I have a field salesperson and I want to make a sale on the spot – in the U.S. taxes are very complicated – all the different taxes have a different ramification.  The problems are in those little pieces of integration where people are saying, “Yes, that is OK.  I can do this, but I can’t do everything. It hasn’t really helped me improve my performance yet.” That is what we are really trying to jump on. When we deliver a mobile, a tablet or a connected service, it should be one and done. If you are using that service and it is doing its job, you shouldn’t have to double enter data, confirm anything, or move to another system to confirm the data.  That is the business value Sage can bring because we have pieces of that pie.

The other thing people are looking for is to have technology help them to make certain decisions which they don’t have the capacity to make today.  We just released a product called Sage Inventory Advisor. It is designed for companies that have large amounts of inventory.  We have built models that can predict the combination of your sales activities with your work flow activities. Based on putting those pieces together, the system goes in and reads from the database of the customer, gets the analysis done, and gets back saying, “Based on your sales, these are the recommended inventory levels you should carry, these are the orders you should delay or cancel. and these are the areas where you should increase your levels.”  It seems logical, but it is a fairly complicated process. The smaller the company, the fewer resources they have to spend on that type of analysis. Because we have the cloud technology, where we can read the data virtually and we have the modeling skills, we can offer these types of services. Our customers can get more answers and make more decisions rather than just having information.

I believe this is the trend people are looking for. As they see technology evolve – they might get offers from all different sides – our customers are exposed to that on a consumer side.  But now they are starting to say, “If you can do this for me and there are no charges associated with it, why can’t you apply that type of logic to the business, wrapped around a certain level of security?”  Those are the types of trends: customers are looking for intelligence rather than just data, and they are looking to have the web simplify processes to enable work to get done regardless of where they are located.

SM: This has been a very interesting conversation. Thank you for your time.

JL: Thank you very much.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America
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