Sage Partners With Salesforce In The Cloud

Cloud computing, like politics, often makes for strange bedfellows. Take for instance Sage, which announced this week a partnership with Salesforce (CRM) under which it is hosting a Sage Life software-as-a-service (SaaS) application on the Salesforce1 cloud platform.

Given the fact that both Sage and Salesforce both sell customer relationship management (CRM) software this alliance may strike some as surprising. But Doug LaBahn, senior vice president, mid-market solutions at Sage, said that Sage also has relationship with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft (MSFT) under which it host other SaaS applications in the cloud. In the case of Sage Life, LeBahn said the mobile capabilities of the Saleforce1 platform carried the day.

With the launch of Sage Life LaBahn said Sage is trying to tear down the walls between the front and back office that have existed for years. In its place Sage Life, makes all office functions available from any mobile computing device.

Sage hasn’t completely worked out a channel strategy around Sage Life just yet but obviously Sage would like organizations to connect with other Sage applications from within Sage Life. But LaBahn noted that there are already two million developers building applications on the Salesforce cloud. That means that Sage partners will have access to a lot more data sources, including the Salesforce CRM application.

Much of the convergence of front and back office applications is being driven by the simple fact that most organizations are now trying to manage their operations in as near time as possible. LaBahn said this creating demand for mobile applications that enable the business to have a common unified view of all the data that impacts business decisions regardless of where they happen to be at any given moment.

In fact, many organizations are deciding where to host their applications in the cloud based on how many other applications are running on that cloud already. A big part of that reason is the assumption that a lot of the data that applications are going to want to interact with is residing locally in the same cloud computing environment. Not only does hosting their application on that cloud give provide access to many other data sources, it eliminates a lot of the network latency issues associated with integrating applications across diverse cloud computing environments.

The challenge that creates for smaller cloud service providers (CSPs) is that in terms of applications the rich CSPs tend to get richer. As more applications land on their cloud not only does the amount of data on that cloud increase, the economy of scale of delivering those cloud services allows them to be more aggressive on the pricing of those services.