Sage Insights Observations

A lot happened at Insights, the Sage partner meeting held in Nashville earlier this month, though not necessarily at the press release level.  I was there and got a sense of change happening.  It was the first anniversary of new CEO Sue Swenson coming on board and our first opportunity to see the imprint she is making on the company.  Last year Swenson had been with the company for only a matter of weeks and as CEO could only talk about the future.  With a year behind her some results are apparent but the expectation is that there is a lot of work ahead. 

The big takeaway I got from attending Insights was of a slumbering giant was waking up.  I was a bit surprised but also happy to see Sage embracing social networking in ACT!.  Twitter and Facebook integration are on the agenda followed by other social media.  As social media continues to increase in popularity you can bet more CRM vendors will take it on.  My big question is how will Sage partners deal with it?

One of Swenson’s early moves was to bring in a new CTO, Montasim Najeeb.  He’s taking a hard look at products, architectures and all the things that go into making whole products.  Importantly, he’s a technology guy with business street cred.  His resume reads like a mini-biography of Silicon Valley with senior positions in product and product strategy for such companies as Oracle, PeopleSoft and WebMD.

One of Najeeb’s challenges, which I think he acknowledged in his keynote is reviewing at a product portfolio that grew by acquisition and now looks like the Noah’s Ark of accounting and front office software.  Noah had it easy by comparison — he could keep things apart.  But in this era, companies are looking for economies that come from consolidation and part of Najeeb’s job is to modernize products and rationalize the portfolio while balancing the needs of the partners who sell the products.  As G.H.W. Bush might have said it — Tough job. Gotta get it done.  Wouldn’t be prudent not to.

Another new face in the executive ranks is Jodi Uecker-Rust President, Sage Business Solutions.  She was previously corporate vice president of Business Solutions with Microsoft and COO of Great Plains Software.  That’s a good background in this space.  Uecker-Rust has a lot on her plate and will be working closely with Najeeb, I think.

The portfolio strategy left the company with many products that were and are architecturally distinct.  The overhead associated with managing so many code sets must be pretty big.  At some point, a prudent manager needs to take inventory and begin a consolidation process and that’s been over due at Sage.

One reason consolidation has not taken place, I think, is the way Sage goes to market.  The company sells through a reseller channel.  The model has some definite strengths and Sage is not the only company in the market to employ it.  There’s no question though that an indirect channel adds complexity to decision-making.  You can’t change a product too much, regardless of how beneficial the change might be, if the partners are not behind you.  Not surprisingly, the company made multiple gestures of support to the partners and tried to reassure everyone that any changes moving forward would be net positive.

All that being said, the CRM/front office applications seem to be in good shape.  Last year the company announced a multi-year plan (the 2010 strategy) to rationalize the CRM products, making ACT! work better with SalesLogix and incorporating new Web technologies.  So far all that seems on track.  I think there’s more work to be done relating to Web-based applications and no one debates that.

The next one to three years will be important for Sage.  The company needs to make progress on some product upgrade and migration issues that, in truth, are over due.  The good news isn’t hard to find though.  Swenson appears to be making some good moves and tough calls and the partner channel is global and energized.

WizKids 2009

Today’s column is a little different from the usual fare.  We’re recognizing a handful of companies with our annual WizKids award for their innovations in front office computing.  The idea behind the award – and a report that goes with it – is that innovation is happening all the time and the best ideas can change our world.  We think the 2009 WizKids all have that capability.

We’ve been lucky over the last five years because most of the companies we singled out for this recognition are still around and doing pretty well.  Many are established companies today but we recall when names like Eloqua, NetSuite and even Salesforce.com were only household words at my house and those of a few other people who track emerging companies like Paul Greenberg. 

You might take exception with the last — after all five years ago Salesforce was already a substantial company.  But in the time, that successful emergent company decided to double down on the on-demand idea with platform as a service and we took notice of that too.

Some pretty darned good companies never got a WizKids award.  The truth is that the judging is a little fickle and since we only recognize a handful of companies each year, it’s easy for a Zoho, a SugarCRM or a Neighborhood America be missed.  As we used to say in Boston baseball circles, there’s always next year.

The WizKids report has tended to be thematic in the last few years, not because we start with a theme in mind but because a theme usually emerges from what looks good or cool.  For example, a few years ago I noticed the dwindling of conventional software companies as WizKids and I don’t think there have been any WizKids who have not been SaaS providers for a while now.

That trend toward themes continues this year and the theme is all about making your company easy to do business with.  You know I have been on this operations kick for a while.  Operations might be the flip side of customer intimacy especially in a recession.  Finding ways to lower your costs and make it easy for your customers to do business with you may not sound very sexy but there is great opportunity in that pursuit. 

Some of our best examples include Zuora for on-demand billing and payments, EchoSign for managing the contracts lifecycle and TimeTrade for making it easy for any business to schedule appointments for their customers.  We also like Right90 because they figured out how to make forecasting meaningful again and Xactly for making it easier for sales employees to work with their organizations and vice versa.  Unisfair and its ilk produce on-demand tradeshows and we think that idea has long legs.

Finally, there’s Manticore Technology.  Very often we have a marketing automation company as a WizKids Award recipient.  Going back a few years, we see an upward trend from providing basic marketing capability to delivering optimum functionality to making marketing automation easy to deliver, configure and use — not to mention low cost.  Manticore represents this last aspect and is an example of why Sales 2.0 is heavily dependent on Marketing 2.0.

Coming out of the last recession we saw new dependence on web based meetings and on-demand software delivery.  I think every recession generates some winners like that.  From this recession, it is becoming clear that social networking is becoming absorbed into the business software suite.  I also think solutions that enable higher levels of operational excellence within each vendor will be natural outgrowths of this downturn. 

These solutions cut fat without damaging muscle — often a tall order — and they prepare us for an upturn that will be tepid.  There will be growth but it won’t be as robust as we had come to expect in the last few years and we will all need operational solutions that help us cope.  Fortunately the wheels of innovation continue to turn and we get what we need, just in time.

Words of wisdom

“If you can’t make money at it, you don’t have a business, you’ve got a hobby.”

Words of wisdom from my dad.

I was surprised by the mini-storm that blew up over Salesforce’s apparent decision to charge ISVs, SIs and other forms of developers for support using their development environment.  Two primary arguments have cropped up, one that support ought to be free and the other that it’s hard to make money if you can’t charge 22% for service.

OK, let’s tease these things apart.  Free support is a good and noble idea and it is encompassed in the basic premise of on-demand or cloud computing or SaaS or whatever you choose to call it.  Subscribe to the application service and you have the right to call in as many times as you want to ask dumb and not-so dumb questions.  In Salesforce’s case, they won’t tell you how to sell but they will help you untangle the differences between leads, contacts and opportunities.  Then they will probably direct you to some of their basic level training.  That’s only fair.

Salesforce, as we all know, also has this on-demand development environment and with it you can build any number of database applications and reports or integrate with whatever else there is in the universe.  At that level, you are playing with the innards and you are dealing with an application that the vendor — i.e. Salesforce — has no control over.  It’s like me putting a turbo on my Honda.  I am free to do that but, understandably, my dealer won’t be happy to see me and all warranties on the power train would, I am sure, be toast.  From then on, if I need to get anything fixed I will probably become a regular caller at Tom and Ray’s NPR show, “Car Talk”.

It seems to me that charging for support when people are using the development environment to make new applications or even new functionality is like putting the turbo on my Honda and it is fair (though I might quibble with the pricing structure).  Supporting smart people building applications in this new environment requires smart people, gear and real estate on the other side.  That has to be paid for.

Now, as far as pricing is concerned, I do believe they (Salesforce) need more than pricing for levels of service and response time.  They also need to build out a matrix for small, medium and big developer customers.  That’s only fair given that the more developers you have the more support you’ll need.  Spare me the argument that your developers are smarter than mine.  Sheesh!

Finally, my friend Barney Beal wrote recently that “Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and many an SAP executive have long maintained that the SaaS business model can be very difficult to turn a profit with. One would imagine it’s especially difficult if you can’t charge those maintenance fees of 22% of net licensing…”

That’s true as far as it goes but keep in mind that even though Salesforce is now a successful CRM provider, making a few bucks, the company is a neophyte in the application tools business.  It gets confusing because it’s all one company but if Salesforce CRM was a distinct entity from Salesforce the tools and hosting company, I think most people would not expect the nascent company to be profitable.  In company and category building eras, few companies make money though many are cash flow positive.  Oracle and SAP didn’t make a ton of money when they were new either.

Last point, it’s especially hard for conventional software companies to make a profit in on-demand but there are different reasons for that which include fundamentally different business paradigms.  Conventional companies are bloated compared with the on-demand companies that I have seen.  Their structural costs are higher.  I find the whole idea that on-demand companies can’t be profitable to be nothing more than the wrong paradigms are being applied.

So all of this brings be back to dear old dad — you have to make a profit.  I don’t have a problem with what Salesforce is doing as long as there is adequate value being exchanged.  Of course I am just an analyst in all this.  No customer likes a price increase or the imposition of a fee when something had been free and some feathers may need to be smoothed here.  Because the other thing you need to have to call yourself a business and not just a hobby is happy customers.

Social networking’s bleeding edge

Facebook faces an interesting problem in how to deal with a small group of Holocaust deniers using the service to meet and share ideas.  Facebook is a private service so there should be little doubt the service could shut down the hate group if it chooses.  But a larger question of how such social networking sites should be policed is at stake.

In the past Facebook stepped in to remove pictures of breast-feeding infants if the company thought too much breast was showing.  That episode provoked an outcry of a different sort.  But together with the Holocaust deniers it focuses us on this point – who gets to decide this stuff and how?

How much latitude should there be on a social site and who gets to decide?  This is the definition of slippery slope because I think reasonable people might agree that motherhood is sacrosanct and hate speech should not be protected.  But what happens when the issues are less black and white and the choices not as clear?  Could Republicans demand Democrats be excluded from a discussion?

The Holocaust issue is being chased by anti-hate groups right now that are petitioning Facebook to take down the offensive speech.  But is this a model that scales?  Again who gets to decide?  This looks like a mob, err, I mean, wisdom of crowds issue and that makes the slope slippery.

This puts me in mind of the newspaper model.  There are lots of things that reasonable people disagree with in the newspapers yet we all acknowledge that journalists maintain a level of professionalism and fair-mindedness – most of the time – that serves to give them a pass when handling difficult issues.  More importantly, no one gets to spout a flat-earth theory in a paper without some diligent fact checking.  If the facts don’t check out, the story doesn’t go up.

It strikes me that we need some form of journalistic standards even for private sites like Facebook.  But standards require editors and a whole infrastructure of people whose jobs and passion are to get the story right.  Are we all going to become journalists?  Take some kind of oath?  Just another example of life at the bleeding edge.

Primer for Social Networking

Malcolm Gladwell (Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers) has made a cottage industry of writing about how people think.  More to the point, how we think when in extreme situations, by which I mean times when we need to think outside of the box. 

Gladwell does not always deal with life and death situations but more the situations that are out of the ordinary experience in life – the kinds of situations you find yourself in relatively infrequently.  I have come to know those situations by the feeling I get of having been lost at the same spot before.  What did I do then I wonder?  Sometimes the answer comes and sometimes I have to improvise.

It’s like that in a recession, I think.  These times, mercifully, happen only occasionally and we forget what they are like in the long interims so that each recession is a new learning experience.  What did we do the last time?  Will it work again?

The current issue (May 11) has a Gladwell article titled “How David Beats Goliath” and you can read it here.  Without saying as much, I think the article is tuned to this recession and to what we can do about it.  Not to give too much away, the article is about thinking outside of the box, about what successful underdogs do to triumph.

The nub of the idea is that underdogs think different, very much in keeping with Apple’s vaunted slogan. Thinking different enables us to change the rules which is especially useful for an underdog David playing by Goliath’s rules.

We’re all underdogs in a recession but the thing we don’t have is an opponent that we can vanquish.  Nonetheless, there is still plenty of need to think different.  At these times, the old ways of doing things don’t work any more, they might work again but it’s a big leap to assume that all of them will.

If past is prologue, one thing you can say for certain about a recession is that it is an opportunity for change — and products and services forged in a recession often have staying power once more normal activity resumes.  Consider the last recession.  Two things that I distinctly recall hitting critical mass in the years after the dot.com bubble burst were on-demand computing and Web based meeting services.

Each of these had been around prior to the recession and each had attracted a small but dedicated following of early adopters.  They also attracted a group of skeptics.  Who would trust their data to the Internet?  What would customers think and say about a vendor who would rather talk and present on-line instead of making a formal sales call?  These were good questions and in a recovery when everything is running well, no one wants to run the experiment for fear that the new solutions would not work well and crater business.  In a recession, you have less to worry about which frees you to try.

I can remember surveying the marketplace routinely every other quarter in those days.  Every survey I did always asked this question: “When you go to the market to evaluate CRM solutions will you at least look at an on-demand solution?”  The question wasn’t about whether or not someone would make a purchase because that kind of question can’t be asked with any certainty of getting a useful response.  But you can ask about intent and that was all I was looking for. 

In survey after survey in the early part of this decade the answers to my question were remarkably consistent.  Somewhere in the low 40% range of people who were thinking about buying CRM software would evaluate on-demand solutions.  Then one day in 2003 everything changed.  Rather than the usual low 40% response to my question, the result came back in the low 80% range.  On-demand had reached its tipping point.

This coincided with the low ebb of the recession, 2003 was a rotten year but from there things began to improve and with it on-demand solutions began to play a larger role in business computing.  I am sure the same thing happened in web-based meetings but I don’t have the data.

In my research and experience it looks like social networking in business is the big takeaway from this recession and that makes a lot of sense to me.  Social networking is the best thing I have seen for enabling a company down to the individual sales representative, to keep selling its brand of thought leadership regardless of whether customers are buying anything else. 

When you think about it, we all want to sell but if we can’t sell product, then we certainly want to be able to continue selling our ideas and ways of doing things.  A customer who is not buying anything but thought leadership at the moment is just a loyal customer short of funds.  But a customer who has given up on the thought leadership is one that is going away.

Understanding these things is just as valuable in a recession as it is in a recovery and I think that vendors who figure this out now are the ones who will come out of the recession the strongest because they will know more than their competition about what customers need and want as well as their biases and beliefs. 

So my advice, if you want it, about getting over this recession is to bone up on social networking and social media.  To help you I have designed a little workshop that you can take right now.  Here goes.

1. Go here and sign up for Facebook.
2. Go here and sign up for Twitter.
3. What are the differences?  When is one a more appropriate vehicle than the other?
4. Read the Gladwell article in the New Yorker on line.
5. Get the the article’s url you’ll need it.
6. Go here and make a tiny url. You need this so that you don’t waste characters in Twitter.
7. Go back to Facebook and find your friends and customers.  Ask them to be friends with you. This will enable you to see each other’s profiles and leave messages.
8. Go to Twitter and find the same people and start following them. They’ll probably start following you.
9. Post a short message on twitter saying something like, “Hey, cool article by Gladwell. Think there’s useful stuff on recession fighting here.”  Remember you only have 140 characters including the turl.
10. Finally learn the importance of # in Twitter.

11.Repeat this every day growing your list of acquaintances and pumping out thought leadership.

Lastly, check out this book: The Facebook Era.

Now you are using social networking and don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t as valuable as a sales call.

Sage Insights ‘09

I am in Nashville through Wednesday this week at the beautiful Gaylord Opry Land.  Call me at 617-901-2072.

Medieval wisdom of crowds

I wanted to write a piece about the wisdom of crowds for a long time but I needed a clip from Monty Python’s “Holy Grail” to make it work.  After a lot of procrastinating I went to YouTube, did the hard work of reviewing all of the Python clips and found the right one.  There is no limit to the effort I will make to write a piece — this research was physically demanding and my sides still ache.

If you are a Python fan you might want to review the clip for sheer fun and even if wacky British humor is not your cup of tea, watching the clip will enhance your understanding of what I am going to say.  So, go ahead, take a look.  I will wait.  Really, it’s OK, there’s a recession on and I have the time.  It’s a little over four minutes.

Ok, welcome back.

If you cheated and just forged ahead without the benefit of Michael Palin and the gang, the clip is a medieval mob scene in which the mob, convinced that a woman is a witch, asks permission from the local knight to burn the witch at the stake.  The knight is skeptical of the claim.  The mob has dressed the poor woman in a witch’s costume and given her a conical hat and fake carrot nose.

The whole scene is contrived and at first you expect the knight through tortured reasoning with the crowd to convince them that the woman is not a witch.  I will leave it to you to watch the clip to find out how the woman is nonetheless condemned and the gods of comedy are served.

My point for a long time, which this clip illustrates, has been that the wisdom of crowds is only as good as the crowd.  That’s because you can’t get new information by asking what people already know.  Those people believed in witches, even the knight, so it was easy to proceed from that error to a burning at the stake.  New information and, hopefully truth, comes from research including setting up an experiment, collecting data and then careful and dispassionate analysis of the data.

Monty Python’s mob simply illustrates that a crowd can pool its existing knowledgebase to provide accurate feedback of group-think.  It also cleverly illustrates Mark Twain’s brilliant observation that “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble.  It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”  At least by Twain’s time we weren’t burning witches.

My point is that in our rush to embrace all things social we run the risk of acting — with all good intentions — like that mob and that’s especially unhelpful because no one has been given the knight’s job of playing devil’s advocate.  I think we can take too much as fact just because it comes from a community of customers, especially if that community has no controls. 

To be sure, there are valid and useful things to be gleaned from customer feedback but feedback is only the first step.  Ideally, feedback should give us some testable hypotheses from which we can extract true knowledge.  All the testing in the world would not have helped the woman in the movie, but that’s the essence of comedy.

The film clip, and the wisdom of crowds, shows the difference between feedback and discovery.  We can run our companies pretty well using feedback most of the time but unless there is a little discovery mixed in and unless the lessons of the discovery process are put to use, we can find ourselves in trouble.

Last week we saw an example.  Chrysler got ready for a bankruptcy filing and GM is not far behind.  In their histories, both companies spent prodigious sums gathering customer feedback.  It showed how much customers liked big cars (maybe that’s all they knew?) and the car companies used the information to justify building even bigger cars and trucks.  I wonder if these companies bothered to ask what people felt about climate change or the high price of fuel.  Since public perception and opinion can change much faster than a company can design and develop cars with higher fuel efficiency, it might have been good to know those things.

Customers can tell us an awful lot but we have to ask the right questions and we have to step out of our contemporary biases.  Technology can do a lot to automate and speed up the asking process but the human element is still important.  We still have to ask the right questions and not flinch when we get the answers.

NetSuite: Game on

I had been skeptical of the on-demand ERP market for several reasons; the biggest is that ERP is a very different animal than CRM.  You can sequester CRM in the front office where most processes have been manual until recently and if something goes wrong with CRM you can always fall back.  The same is not true of ERP.  As we have seen again and again in the last several decades, if ERP doesn’t work or doesn’t install cleanly, you will need to change your name and move to Texas.

So in ERP the idea of providing it on-demand somehow looks like adding a layer of complexity rather than taking one away as is the case with CRM.  All that may be changing now as NetSuite appears to have gotten its game on.  The company offers a soup to nuts array of ERP, CRM and eCommerce delivered on-demand and after some early stumbles — and despite the recession — appears to be pulling itself together very nicely.

From my vantage point, it appears that one of the big success factors is that the company is doing a better job of picking its customers.  When it was founded as NetLedger, the company had a decided bias toward the SMB market.  And while the executives might still point to that virtue the financial reports show a move up market to a place where customers are big enough to have staffs that can take on an ERP implementation and where budgets have enough room for the training and services necessary for success.

NetSuite also has taken on the cloud computing trend with gusto and though they are much smaller than Salesforce.com, they have aggressively gone in for a culture of building and customizing within their tool set.  They have also brought to market several industry tuned versions of their whole product line.

Yesterday, NetSuite announced its Q1 2009 numbers and they were good overall though the street will be expecting more soon.  Q1 is the second quarter in which NetSuite declared a non-GAAP profit though by GAAP standards they are still manufacturing red ink, but that’s improving.  There was a respectable revenue increase (up 22% to $41.6 million) and an eye-popping 542% sequential increase in non-GAAP operating income.

To be fair, these are not the kinds of numbers that make you a household name but given the state of the marketplace, the economy and the time in its life-cycle, you have to tip your hat to Zach Nelson and his team for going strong.

Actually, you need to tip your cap to Larry Ellison too, if you want to.  It’s Larry’s company and his imprimatur is all over it.  The idea of a suite of end-to-end products and the move to take things up market are two strong indicators of Ellison’s approach. 

What’s especially interesting to me is that Ellison has put so much into building a mini-replica of Oracle’s applications suite approach for the SaaS market with NetSuite.  If I didn’t know better, and who says I do?, I would say that NetSuite is an attempt to build an applications business on-demand that could some day be the obvious transitional choice for thousands of Oracle application customers who finally get the on-demand religion. 

NetSuite is a public company with Ellison as the principal shareholder and the day could come when Oracle absorbs NetSuite and operates two divisions, one for the database and one for the applications.  That’s not very different from the way things are but it does offer the benefit of building up a new applications division that is based on on-demand computing while keeping the on-premise business humming until the time is right.

Time and circumstance will tell if my thoughts are even remotely in line with what is really in the offing.  For the time being, NetSuite is on schedule to make money and prove its mettle as a free standing company.  They’re moving up market and bringing out the kind of additional functionality they would need to become part of a more elaborate plan. 

The people are nice too and they’re fun to watch.

Who’s our daddy?

I was wondering the other day about who really represents the technology movement these days.  Not that long ago there were multiple colorful personalities vying for the unofficial title of Chief Nerd (CN), now the office seems vacant.  It’s an important question and maybe it says a lot about the technology world.

For example, I called it a movement but is there really still a movement?  Was there ever a movement?  I can trace the term High-Technology to the late 1970’s but Wikipedia finds the first use of the phrase “high tech” in a New York Times story from 1957 (about two years before the integrated circuit was patented) about atomic energy in Europe.  

In the ensuing decade the phrase was used on average once per year in the paper.  Then, in 1968 there was an article about Route 128 outside Boston that used “high technology” in what I would call its modern sense.  Shortly thereafter the phrase became associated with investment, venture capital and the party was on.

Ken Olsen, founder of Digitial Equipment Corporation, was one of the first personalities to speak for or about the movement and he was eventually followed by Larry Ellison of Oracle when databases were the hot topic, then a cascade of overlapping Chief Nerds arrived on the scene.  Scott McNealy at Sun talked up reduced instruction set computing, Bob Noyce at Intel and a host of others led the charge for the microcomputer.  Steve Jobs became known as a visionary for the user experience and Bill Gates played Henry Ford knitting together hardware, operating system and software thus making computing affordable to the masses.

I know this summary is too brief and leaves many people out but I am not writing a history of the times.  My point is that each era of what should be called the high-tech epoch had at least one personality who embodied the age, more or less spoke for it and laid out the vision.  In this, the high-tech epoch was no different from the industrial revolution or the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.  In a sense, high-tech seems to be the culmination of those eras like the New Stone Age follows the Old (Neolithic and Paleolithic, respectively).

Perhaps one reason that no single person commands the stage today is that high technology itself has fragmented in so many directions.  People like Marc Benioff speak for the SaaS computing movement and I suppose there are be others in security, mobility, back office, and social networking but there’s too much to know for any one person to either write about it or to be the CN. 

The other possibility, and the two are not mutually exclusive but overlap, is that high-tech is over.  It’s not that technology is ending and we are entering a dark age, but the movement may simply have become mainstream enough that it has been absorbed more or less into the culture.  There is no high-tech movement anymore because we now live in a highly technologically dependent culture. 

This recession, like many before, may mark the end of eras, some trivial and others important.  On-demand computing appears to be strengthening its grip on the imagination inversely proportional to the waning attention given to conventional computing.  Other ideas are still on the horizon and include electric cars, robotics, nano-technology, competitive alternative energy, carbon sequestration and much more.  Some will work well and others will be dead ends or die out like the cell phone mounted in a car.  They are all in some sense high technologies but they take us further and further from enterprise computing and they have not yet produced a catalyzing personality. 

So the question remains, Who’s our daddy?

Salesforce charges partners for service

Effective May 1, 2009 and with a 60 day grace period, Salesforce.com will begin charging its developer partners for support.  I have not seen a press release but I have a data sheet on the offering. 

Some people have questions, mostly of the “Is this appropriate?” variety.

I think it is provided there is adequate value exchanged and that remains to be proven.  But generally, developers and partners are usually well versed in the basics of the technology.  Their questions tend to go deep into the bowels of the beast and for that reason a company like Salesforce needs to staff up with smart professionals who know the product and its limitations at a deep level.  That’s a service worth paying for.

The grace period starts today and the fees start July 1, 2009.  There will be three levels of service — Partner Premier, Partner Basic, Single Cases and Community.  Fees range from free to $24,000.

As a practical business issue, the charge for this kind of service is simply a cost of doing business and the target audience, ISVs and Systems Integrators/Consulting Partners will use the information they receive from the program to serve customers and generate revenue.

I suspect that there will be some complaining about the new fees, but who wouldn’t charge for such a service?  I can see a point if a small partner needs fast turnarounds on some questions but doesn’t have the ability to pay the premium price.  Some pricing brackets may be needed simply because larger partners are likely to use services more frequently than smaller partners.

These fees are ultimately a good idea and they may encourage the target audience to get training for their personnel.  Perhaps they will be able to lower their dependence on support services with more training and that would be a good thing for all parties.