Sage Offers Bounty On Salesforce.com Customers

The bounty promises Sage resellers 100 percent margin on the value of the first year of any contract that converts Salesforce.com customers to the rival Sage service. After the first year, Sage partners can earn margins of anywhere from 10 percent to 35 percent on additional years of the contract, said Jim Foster, executive vice president for the midmarket division of Sage, Irvine, Calif.

Some Sage solution providers said they welcome the incentives to attack Salesforce.com.

"No vendor out there has been really focused on going after Salesforce, so this is good to see," said Yacov Wrocherinsky, CEO of Infinity Info Systems, New York. "Salesforce has about 200 salespeople, while Sage has 2,000 to 3,000 partners. Who do you think is going to win?"

Foster said it has taken Sage until now to put the right infrastructure in place to support a software-as-a-service business model in the channel. That infrastructure has been evolving since Sage acquired Accpac from Computer Associates, which is the source of the code for the rebranded SageCRM.com offering.