Sage Channel Advocate Paul Johnson Exits Company

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In fact, NetSuite claims to have won more than 500 former Sage customers in recent months. But here’s the twist: Sage is under pressure in North America, but the company’s most recent annual results beat financial analyst expectations.

Johnson’s departure was originally reported by Accounting Today. Sage has since confirmed Johnson’s departure to The VAR Guy. Sage VP of Sales Tom Miller described Johnson’s departure in a letter to channel partners over the weekend (see complete letter in Comments area below). In the letter, Miller credited Johnson for multiple channel milestones because he:

Glass Half Empty? …

Johnson’s departure comes amid multiple key North America changes at the company, some of which could potentially unnerve channel partners:

Rivals smell blood in the water. NetSuite, the SaaS ERP specialist, claims to have converted more than 500 Sage customers to NetSuite SaaS in recent months, reports Enterprise Irregulars.

… Or Glass Half Full?

Still, Sage’s most recent annual results beat investors’ expectations in early December 2010, as small business customers outside of the U.S. resumed IT spending, Reuters reported.

Also, Sage North America this month unveiled Managed Cloud Servers and Staging Environments for Sage SalesLogix Cloud CRM customers. The Managed Cloud Servers let customers or Sage CRM Solutions Business Partners extend CRM functionality by enabling add-on, ISV, and custom applications in the Cloud, Sage claims.

Also, Sage has a pretty extensive channel team — from Tom Miller on down. In fact, the company put the spotlight on multiple channel leaders in a February 2010 CRN article. The channel pundits included:

According to their LinkedIn profiles, Carroll, Johnson, Pieterick and Wingrove all remain with Sage. Also, the Sage Summit — for channel partners and customers — remains scheduled for July 10-17, 2011. Still, the timing could be ominous: Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) 2011 is scheduled for the same week.

The VAR Guy is checking in with Sage for additional comment from Miller. Accounting Today speculates that Johnson is heading to Intuit.

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