More Web 2.0 in ERP: Sage Gets Hip with An Updated Flagship Product

Sage forewarned us of their leap into Enterprise 2.0, and this week they gave more details of the impending splash: their flagship Sage ERP X3 v6 will have a cloud extension called the Enterprise Webtop. It’s an admitted change in Sage’s working vision, and during development, the emphasis was on the user and ensuring the product could adapt to the user’s modus operandi—i.e. whether they prefer desktop or web applications.

For Sage Enterprise Webtop, Sage collaborated with Netvibes to deliver customizable dashboards with personalized widgets and applications for managing both back- and front-office activities. There will be drag-and-drop publishing, professional widgets for querying databases and viewing customer information (to name a few), and strategic support for ensuring successful implementation.

This is all good news for mid-market ERP, and customers looking for a more modern solution. There are, of course, still naysayers when it comes to social software in the workplace, but Sage’s impending update offers more work-related, internal online social interaction and therefore serves more as a collaborative platform than “social software.” Sage is pushing a definite change in pace, but the previous underlying goals—cost and time savings, and site interoperability among dispersed teams—is still the same. And I think most of us are happy to see more cloud ERP deployments anyhow.

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