Third Idea Consulting

[Edited for some small inaccuracies. My bad.]

I recently had the pleasure of attending Sage Analyst Day 2011, hosted in Boston on February 9, 2011. A select group of industry watchers got to hear about plans for Sage North America in the coming year, especially its CRM product line.

One early order of business was to announce (reiterate, actually) the pending retirement of Sage North America CEO Sue Swenson later this year, after nearly three years of service. While I didn’t get many opportunities to speak to Swenson directly during her time with Sage, I was impressed with her focus on moving her division forward, and her success in achieving her goals during a bad stretch for the global economy. The company returned to revenue growth in the second half of 2010 under her leadership.

This summer (the guess is mid-June) Swenson will hand over control to CEO-designate Pascal Houillon, a 20-year Sage veteran who has served as the head of operations in several European countries. His stated primary goals are to match the company’s product line with its customer base more effectively; to make the Sage brand better known on this side of the Atlantic; and to return the company to making acquisitions as opportunities present. Likely targets are Web-based and connected services vendors, as well as regional specialists.

Your ears might have perked up at that last bit about connected services and Web services. I know mine did. Sage has been inching toward the Cloud for a few years now, but it looks like the pace is about to accelerate.

Sage Advisor

The first piece mentioned was Sage Advisor. Users of Peachtree—sorry, Sage Peachtree—will recognize it from a function they’ve had access to for four years. Advisor is a cloud-based data mining tool and recommendation engine, collecting more than 500 data points and using them to provide advice to the user. The advice is delivered (depending upon context and preferences) via Sage employees, a virtual assistant, and in-product chat.

Sage Advisor exists to “create a personal connection to Sage brands for every user,” according to the company. It’s not just about selling more software to expand Sage’s footprint with its customers; Advisor can point out existing (read: already-paid-for) capabilities that aren’t being used and could help with a given task, and can also tell users how to turn off certain functions to streamline their workflow.

Many of you read the words “virtual assistant” and had a bad flashback to Clippy, Microsoft Office’s much-maligned helper. Sage Advisor appears to be much less intrusive, and the company claims more than 90 percent of its Sage Peachtree customers are opted in to the service.

Another function of Sage Advisor is to provide client data to Sage and its partners about usage patterns, third-party applications in use, system specifications, popular reports, and more. Sage predicts this could increase close rates for partners 60 to 70 percent.

Sage Connected Services

Connected services is Sage’s umbrella term for discrete applications provided to its customers (both on-premises and SaaS) via the Cloud. Many will integrate through SData, Sage’s new open-standard Web protocol which allows front- and back-office applications to communicate better with each other and with other apps.

This will be a major area of expansion and advancement for Sage, adding capabilities from the cloud in a modular fashion to serve up what customers need. Payment services, legal counseling, tax compliance, lead generation, and shopping carts are just some examples Sage provided.

Services will be delivered within the main Sage application, with Sage Advisor identifying and suggesting appropriate apps, making it something of an app marketplace. Because SData is an open standard, there is a large opening in connected services for third-party providers, and for integration with non-Sage products. Look for a Google Apps integration very soon.

Acceleration Squared

Sage’s foray into cloud services creates an excellent opportunity for growth, if it can manage the potential chaos. With SData, Advisor, and connected services all turned on, Sage partners and customers will have greater access to the company than ever before, and that’s saying something. Demand for new functions and new products can be watched in real time, and the delivery time is considerably reduced. Sage will be drinking from the firehose in a way that only SCRM- and cloud-savvy companies can; if it uses that information and the dynamic strength of an involved community, we will see a very different Sage by this time next year.

For another (and quite excellent) discussion of Sage North America’s Analyst Day, see Denis Pombriant’s recent article for CRM Buyer. Denis has been watching Sage for longer than I have, and he’s one smart cookie.

(Disclosure: Sage is a former client of mine.)

A theme running through the CRM industry’s discourse lately is that of social CRM. This is a good thing because it means I’ve started my practice in a hot market space. It also means there’s a lot of hype and hoopla coming from all corners of the vendor community. The old guard are adding social components to their CRM offerings, defending their honor as the vendors that have survived the Darwinian meat grinder of enterprise software; the newcomers are starting from the premise that old-school CRM has earned its supposedly negative reputation and it’s time for a fresh approach, hitching their wagons to the social trend.

Not long ago, I took a briefing with Larry Ritter, senior vice president and GM of CRM solutions for Sage North America, about the company’s plans for ACT! in 2011 and beyond. I thought I’d written briefly about it here, but it appears I was in error—apologies to Ryan Zuk, Sage’s PR ace, for my oversight.

Also not long ago (Monday, in fact), I took a briefing with Jon Ferrara, the creator of ACT!’s long-time rival GoldMine (now owned by FrontRange), and now the CEO and founder of Nimble. Nimble is one of the new wave of CRM vendors, while ACT! (and GoldMine, for that matter) represent CRM’s roots. The opportunity for me to compare and contrast is just too sweet to pass up.

Let’s start with Sage. As you can read here, the company has been doing a good job of following the will of its audience by adding more Web services, improving (and changing the name of) workflows, and keeping the design easy to use. ACT! is more of an entry-level CRM product than a premier suite—that distinction in Sage’s catalog fits better with SalesLogix—but it provides a good range of functions and customizability for its price and target market. The product has been around for more than 20 years in one form or another, and Sage knows better than to mess with success.

It is possible to integrate social networking features into ACT! if the customer desires, but it’s not something that comes in the yellow ACT! box. You’ve got to customize for that, which helps drive business for Sage’s army of partner-resellers. The message here is that Sage expects the typical ACT! user to be a small business that either doesn’t understand or isn’t likely to derive much value from social CRM, but there’s enough meat on ACT!’s bones for most SMBs to get an okay meal.

I should probably fault Sage more for this, but I just can’t work up a whole lot of indignation. While I am excited by the possibilities of a social approach to CRM, I know that not every business is ready for it, not every business can really exploit it, and the ones that fit those descriptions don’t want to pay for something they won’t use. Sage is saying, “We’re the same we’ve always been, and we’re here for you. We’ll let you move at your own pace.” This is a comforting message for an SMB executive who isn’t striving to push the business into the Fortune 500.

In the destinationCRM article I linked, CRM godfather Paul Greenberg makes an important distinction describing ACT!: “It’s as close to CRM as it ever will be,” Greenberg says of the contact management solution. “It will never be full-blown CRM — but do they provide business value to small businesses? Oh, God, yeah.” He is, as usual, right. ACT! is still very much a contact manager—one that can do some really neat things to be sure, but it’s still not a CRM suite. It can be turned into one, and the e-marketing module added to ACT! 2011 blurs the line a bit, but what we have here is one of the progenitors of modern CRM trying to remain viable (and succeeding, I think) by providing a safe, easy, entry-level option that can grow for a while with the user. At worst, I wonder why a contact management-plus application isn’t doing more with social networking contacts, but there doesn’t seem to be much grumbling about this by anybody other than curmudgeons like me.

Which brings us to Nimble. Jon Ferrara got out of the contact management business about 10 years ago to concentrate on building a family instead of a company. He’s back with a reimagined approach to CRM, built from the ground up to account for and take advantage of social media.

In our briefing, Jon hit a lot of the best talking points about social CRM. Businesses always need to attract and retain customers, and the old methods are becoming outdated. Companies must get as social as their customers, listen to the conversations, and participate in kind—and a company can’t be social externally without being social internally as well. So, if most of the CRM systems deployed today are used primarily for contact management and SFA anyway—a claim that rings true even if I don’t have any data in front of me to back it up—there’s a need for a system built to combine social networking and basic CRM.

Ferrara contends that Nimble is that product. When it becomes available, Nimble Core will give individual users the “3 Cs” of Contacts, Calendaring, and Communications by providing a single environment for viewing and sending emails, tweets, Facebook updates, and pretty much everything else, and will do it for free. The design of Nimble is as comforting as ACT!’s, in its way; it looks a lot like any of the current social networking tools in use by the general public, as well as more business-focused things like Yammer. There’s lots of white space, the view can be easily customized, and all the immediately relevant info (and only the immediately relevant info) is up front.

After Core, there will be more. For $9 per user per month, Nimble will provide a Team edition. For $19/u/m, the sales functionality shows up. If you go for the full $39/u/m, Nimble reveals its full CRM capabilities. Mind you, I have no idea what those are; all will be revealed at a later date.

No matter what I say about Nimble, it’s important to remember that the product is still in private beta. The higher-end functions—teamwork, SFA, and CRM—are a long way off yet. I haven’t touched the beta yet, though I will be doing so in the very near future.

When a veteran like Jon Ferrara fronts a product like Nimble, it says one thing: “It’s time for a change.” He’s got a point. GoldMine was one of the products that changed—nay, created—the CRM software industry, and Nimble is going to try to serve the same purpose for social CRM. The new discipline is composed of older, proven CRM apps augmented by new tools that only enable the social components, so a social CRM app designed to be a social CRM app would be a great start. The message is there’s a new wave in business, and you’ve got to surf it with a new board or get swamped riding the old.

My fear is that there will be too much focus on social and not enough on CRM. People like to say that CRM fails, or even that it is a failure. I disagree with the notion that a $12 billion industry, complete with innovators and success stories, is a failure. A change is necessary, because the behavior of customers has changed. But there are still things that a CRM system has to do that aren’t about social media, and there is danger that the move to social CRM will go like a political campaign: So much time is spent hearing about what’s wrong with the incumbent that we never get a handle on the challenger’s qualities.

Both ACT! and Nimble will have a place in the CRM world, and I’m not about to recommend one over the other (especially because one isn’t available yet). But you can start making your decision based on the language each company is speaking. Is Sage following a careful and sensible agenda, or is it in denial? Is Nimble the next game-changer, or is it a box of hype? Your answer to those questions will say more about your needs than about the products, but that’s good. If your choice doesn’t reflect your needs, you’ll have a failure on your hands no matter which way you turn.

So, after a less-than-spectacular 2009, we’ve arrived in a new year. And it’s cold. Really cold.

Maybe it’s not that bad where you are, but in New York we have it frigid and windy. I happen to love cold weather, and even I find this to be a bit much. The window I’m sitting next to as I write this is not the best insulated, so a draft is pouring off of it onto my left arm. (I prefer to think of pouring drafts in a more delicious liquid format, but I’m not here to talk about my weakness for fine adult beverages.)

I can hear you wondering what, if anything, this has to do with the business of getting and keeping customers. I’m getting to that. It’s just taking me a while because my brain is impaired by the cold; my fingers aren’t doing much better. It’s cold enough that, were I outside, I’d be looking for a shop to go into just to warm up. As it is, I’m considering leaving my drafty apartment for just such an adventure. And there’s the tie-in.

Walk-in customers and their online equivalent represent a great opportunity to earn new business, but only if the customer experience you provide is up to the challenge. Anybody can turn up the heat, but turning casual browsers into new customers requires warmth. Making people feel welcome goes a long way toward getting them to see what you have to offer, and this applies whether you serve consumers or businesses, in a shop or on a Web site.

Most businesses aim to showoff value first, with announcements about the latest sales and best brands right in customers’ faces when they walk in the door. This can backfire, because it’s very off-putting. Shoppers who know what they’ve come for aren’t interested, and casual foot traffic gets the sense that they are prey for a sales pitch. “How can I help you” is much more welcoming than “what are you looking for,” wouldn’t you agree?

For brick and mortar shops, simple touches like having hot tea or coffee available in the winter—preferably free—and cold drinks in the summer can earn a favorable impression and a closer look. Williams-Sonoma often has free mulled cider in the winter, and remembering that is nearly enough to get me to go there now. Always allow (read: encourage) staff to engage walk-ins in non-sales related conversation as long as it isn’t taking away from something they need to be doing. Things like that go a long way.

Getting beyond specifics like hot drinks and warm conversation in retail stores, the general principle of welcoming applies to any business. If you can make your customers think kindly of you, they will always have you in mind. They will think of you as more than just a supplier of products—and they will spread the word about how pleasant it is to do business with you, even when they’re not actively buying.

When budgets are tight, businesses tend to focus on cutting costs and reducing expenses. This usually leads to reticence on the part of executives to spend for new or upgraded business technology. Sadly, this is a case of being penny wise but pound foolish, if the figures reported in a recent study are to be believed. Billions of dollars are slipping through the fingers of companies who deliver poor customer service, and a lack of good CRM is one of the causes.

“The Cost of Poor Customer Service: The Economic Impact of the Customer Experience and Engagement,” a joint study by Ovum and Greenfield Online (commissioned by Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories) surveyed nearly 9,000 consumers in 16 countries. It revealed that lost relationships—defined in the study as transactions taken to a competitor or abandoned entirely—cost businesses $338.5 billion per year. That works out to about $243 per loss, according to the study. So if somebody ever says, “So what’s one customer more or less,” now you can tell them. For complete reporting, see the destinationCRM.com article by Christopher Musico.

Certainly, poor business processes and a lack of understanding of how to best relate to customers take part of the blame, but everything cited in the study as needing improvement—being trapped in automated self-service, waiting too long for service, callers having to repeat themselves, and customer service representatives lacking the skills to answer inquiries—everything can be remedied by smart use of CRM technology. Here’s a list of the traditional solutions to these problems:

• Trapped in automated self service? This one is easy, even anti-tech: Make sure there’s a way to escalate from the IVR to a live agent. Call deflection has value only if customers are getting the help they need. A timer or tracker that follows a customer’s call and lets a customer service rep break in with live service if the call goes too long or revisits the same menu too often would work if the company (foolishly, in my opinion) doesn’t want a “press zero to speak to an agent” option.
• Waiting too long? There are more than a few on-demand contact centers out there, as well as software that allows companies to direct their call overflow to work-at-home agents who can help absorb the volume. Take your pick.
• Callers having to repeat themselves? This makes me sad, because even simple integration between the CRM system, the IVR, and the agent’s desktop takes care of this, 100 percent. I can’t believe it’s still an issue.
• Representatives lacking the required skills and permissions? A well-stocked and -maintained knowledgebase means that your customers don’t have to suffer for gaps in a particular agent’s expertise. E-learning tools help agents stay current on important information. Not penalizing an agent for handing the call off to somebody who does know how to help, rather than flailing uselessly at a problem, is also wise.

Those are the usual ways to deal with the issues brought up in Musico’s article. It also mentions social media as a potential problem solver. I don’t deny the closing statements of the piece, where Ovum analyst Daniel Hong says it will take some time to get businesses comfortable and proficient with social CRM, but the investment of time and money must be made. It’s been shown that fellow customers are often better at solving some problems than a CSR, so answers are provided for free without costing agent time. Answers generated by the community can be added to the company’s knowledgebase, and over time this feedback can help fix issues with the next product or service in development. That sense of shared experience also makes for loyal customer advocates, which is money in your pocket.

Basic integration has been too long in coming for too many businesses, so perhaps the study will show them the true cost of delay. I hope they remember the social CRM part of the integration as well—bringing businesses into closer and more productive contact with their customers.

My latest guest post for Sage SalesLogix is up at their community site. You can see all the glory there (Sage deserves the traffic), or you can read it here, after the jump and some comments I’m about to make which are not related to that.

At this moment I am busily finishing up the chapter I’m writing for a joint-effort book about so-called Digital Natives, those people who never knew a world without cellphones, Internet, and other technological marvels of the modern age. (I don’t know what the title is yet, or I’d point you to a preorder link.) It’s been more difficult than I expected, because I’ve had to do a lot of relearning about how things are different with that mindset.

I’m not technically a digital native, but I was naturalized at a fairly young age (hey, that’s a good line; I think I’ll use it) because of my nerdy youth and the degree to which the school system and my parents catered to it. Still, I remember when every phone was attached to a wall or sitting on a table, except for pay phones on the street (which people actually used). I remember when high-tech home electronics included the Atari 2600 and the microwave oven, and cable TV remote controls were switch boxes hardwired to the cable box.

More importantly, I remember what customer experience was like before the data revolution, and even for some time afterward. Having this perspective is good for my work, but it also makes it a challenge.

The lesson was reinforced this afternoon at a visit with my doctor. I needed to renew a fistful of prescriptions, and she offhandedly suggested I could save some copay money and get a little extra convenience by using my insurance’s mail service. I know plenty of people who use such a program, but it had just never occurred to me. It’s so natural for me to take my paper scripts to the local pharmacy, wait (or leave and come back), and interact with the pharmacist directly, that I don’t think to do it any other way. I still haven’t decided which way to go this time. It’s not an issue of the digital age, at least not directly, but it reminded me of just how much we’re conditioned by what has become habit.

Anyway, enough of that. Here’s the Sage guest blog I promised:

I hope you’ve all had a good couple of weeks since Sage Summit. This was the first week back in my home and office since starting my guest blog for Sage just beforehand, and already it’s after Thanksgiving. That means we’ve just been through Black Friday and you’re likely reading this on its younger sibling Cyber Monday.

I’ve always been confused by Black Friday; so much importance is placed on one day that it could be its own holiday. Apparently, Black Friday is the Groundhog Day of retail, as one can predict the success or failure of the holiday shopping season by looking at the results. Retailers sweeten the pot by launching progressively larger discounts and special promotions that day, after teasing us with Christmas advertising starting sometime in mid-September.

I don’t see how it works. Sane individuals should avoid Black Friday like the Black Plague. Named after the chaos surrounding the U.S. stock market crash in 1929, Black Friday references the current shopping day’s murderously hectic pace and impossible crowds. Between that and the post-Thanksgiving food hangover, I don’t want to be within three miles of a shopping mall. Most years, I don’t even leave my home.

In terms of customer experience, Black Friday should be the disaster it sounds like, but shoppers keep on showing up and the lines grow ever longer. Maybe there’s something about walking into a retail war zone that stimulates our primitive hunter-gatherer instincts (hunting for deals and gathering merchandise). Or maybe it’s that the experience of fighting through crowds is what we’ve come to expect—it’s not a bad experience if it’s the one you’re planning on. An easy shopping day might be unsatisfying for such people.

Which brings us to Cyber Monday, the e-commerce equivalent to Black Friday. Unlike Black Friday, though, Cyber Monday is mostly fictional. (Economists will disagree with me, but I can handle that.) There are reasons to shop early if you’re doing it in person, because it’s hard to predict how and when shops will restock. (There might also be some gamesmanship in betting more shoppers will be like me and stay home.) There is no similar incentive to shopping online on any particular day. As long as you place your orders 10 days before Christmas, the items are pretty much guaranteed to arrive in time. No fuss, no muss, no risk of car accidents or brawls over the last Malibu Stacy Beach Bungalow in the store.

Some of you are retailers, but just about all of you work for a business that sells something, complete with sales incentives and projections. How are you managing your customers’ expectations of dealing with you? Are you subjecting them to a stressful Black Friday experience when you engage with them? Do they feel no urgency to close the deal, a la Cyber Monday? Or are you providing them with an easy, pleasant sales process that keeps them coming back no matter the time of year?

Sage Summit has begun, even if the official welcoming keynote hasn’t yet been delivered. This is a customer event, y’see, so it’s fitting that Sage started by recognizing some of its more notable ones. In other words, it was the Sage Customer Awards Program luncheon. Here, in brief, are the winners, with a few comments by me where needed.

• MyBizCounts.com Contest Winner: INDIE PEACE, an Atlanta-based fashion design company that focuses on sustainable, eco-friendly products and manufacturing techniques. (This contest called for original video commercials and essays from people with new business ideas or young startups (two years and under), with $20,000 and a bunch of Sage software—Peachtree, ACT!, and Timeslips—as the prize. The company made a cute presentation, and has some really nice wearable designs that won’t kill the planet. Good stuff.)

• Rookie of the Year: Coilhose Pneumatics, East Brunswick, NJ, using MAS 500; Net@Work is the Sage implementation partner. (Product costing and inter-company transactions are some of the more onerous parts of a business that deals in specialized products. Guess what Coilhouse improved with MAS 500? Net@Work is known to me as a talented integrator, so kudos to that team as well.)

• Best Use of Customization: Metropolitan Regional Information Systems (MRIS), Rockville, MD, using Sage MAS 500; Blytheco LLC is the implementation partner. (MRIS got more than 32,000 customers to use the online bill-pay system it built this year, something that wouldn’t have been possible with its legacy accounting system. Automation is a good thing sometimes.)

• Community Stewardship: Teach For America, New York, NY using SalesLogix; Infinity Info Systems is the implementation partner. (I’ve met with IIS before, and its founder Yacov Wrosherinsky is one of the most-recognized Sage partners there is; I’m not surprised one of his clients took an award.)

• Best End-to-End Deployment: Curbers, Inc., Salisbury, NC, using MAS 500, FAS, and SalesLogix; Practical Software Solutions is the implementation partner. (Combining ERP and CRM throughout the enterprise makes tremendous sense for many businesses, especially those in heavy industry. Power Curbers makes, customizes, and sells machines for making sidewalks, curbs, barriers, bridges, and other concrete items—that’s about as heavy as heavy industry gets.)

• Best Innovation Award: Entertainment Lighting Services, Inc., Sun Valley, CA, using MAS 500; Information Integration Group is the implementation partner. (ELS really needed to get enterprise software in place, and the results are telling. It reduced inventory shrinkage by half, and reduced the month-end close process from four weeks to five days—their monthly close used to take a month. Think about that.)

• Lifetime Achievement Award: Amix Salvage & Sales Ltd. , Surrey, BC, using Accpac and SageCRM; Plus Computer Solutions is the implementation partner. (Too often, especially at the Oscars, lifetime achievement awards are a way of saying, “you’ve never won a real award, so here’s a pat on the back to thank you for hard work.” That’s not what this is; Amix has been a Sage customer for 17 years, and had its first software package installed under MS-DOS. Sage has seen Amix through booms and busts for longer than I’ve had a writing career. Clearly both companies are doing something right.)

Congratulations to all the winners. I’m hoping to track down Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal of Beagle Research Group and one of the contest judges, to talk about what went into the award decisions.

I’m about to start a guest blogging project for Sage Software, the company that brings you ACT!, Sage CRM, and SalesLogix. With their partner summit starting Monday, we figured it was a good time for me to introduce myself to the Sage user community, and here’s how I did it:

“Hi, I’m Marshall Lager, and if you read the ACT! by Sage blogs you’ll be seeing a fair bit more of that name in the coming weeks. That’s because Sage has invited me in as a guest blogger to provide my own perspective on CRM, Sage products, and customer experience. I’ll be kicking it off at Sage Summit, the annual partner conference, but I wanted to introduce myself and give you an idea of what you’ll be in for.

“You may be wondering, “Who is this guy, and why should I care?” Fair questions. I’m the founder and managing principal of Third Idea Consulting LLC, a consultancy focusing on CRM, especially social CRM and the increased power social media have given to customers. Those of you who read CRM magazine may also know me from there, where I was senior editor for four and a half excellent years. I’m the guy who wrote (and still writes) the back page column, Pint of View.

“That tells you a bit about who and what I am, but it might be just as useful to tell you who and what I am not.

• I am not a Sage implementer, employee, or partner. I am being paid formy writing, and I respect Sage’s products and am familiar enough with them to not make a fool of myself or the company. If you have specific technical questions about integration, business processes, or software capabilities, though, you’ll be better off talking to a Sage exec or ACT! Certified Consultant (ACC). I’m more of an ideas guy.
• I am not a spokesperson for anybody’s brand but my own. But maybe I can help you with yours. One of my chief contentions is that businesses don’t have the monodirectional control of their communications or their brands that they once did, and I think it’s a good thing. I’m all about customer empowerment, and how it can ultimately make businesses better. As such, I don’t really care what CRM system or techniques you use, as long as you are doing whatever it takes to keep your customers coming back with smiles on their faces, cash in their hands, and referrals in their mouths.
• I am not always serious. Writing is a pleasure for me. Thinking about CRM is also a pleasure. Combining them makes me do a little happy dance in my brain. At the same time, I realize that serious business shouldn’t always be serious, and we all need a change of perspective from time to time in order to prevent tunnel vision. Again, readers of Pint of View already know what I’m talking about. You might not always agree with me, or laugh with me, or find my comments in good taste, but they should make you think. If that’s happening, I’m doing my job.

“So, what can you expect from me? Over the next couple of months, I’ll be providing you with my perspective on the CRM industry, Sage news, and the state of customer/company dialogue in general. I’m starting with Sage Summit because it’s a big event, so you will see me all over the conference, talking to people like you about what matters to you. There will probably be some video podcasts or Q&A sessions along the way, so you can interact more directly with me.

“I’m also available for phone consultations, on-site visits, white papers, weddings, and bar mitzvahs. But you’ll have to pay me. The guest blog is entirely at your disposal. I hope you find it useful.”

There it is. If anybody’s going to be in the Atlanta area this week, look for me with notebook and Flip video in hand, trying to provide my perspective on what’s going on with Sage. I’ll be continuing the guest blog for a couple of months, and will mirror it here. I’m looking forward to the access to Sage that this will give me, as well as the chance to affect its users and partners in a (hopefully) positive way.