Sage has acquired Bangert, a longtime Sage CRE partner specializing in onboarding for Sage Intacct Construction. The deal, announced August 18, brings Bangert’s AI-enabled onboarding platform, AskRichard, along with its implementation methodology, directly into Sage.
Dating back to the days of Timberline Software (before it was acquired by Sage), Bangert has been a construction-focused VAR, so much of the acquired IP should pertain to the Sage Intacct Construction product (although it also seems like a logical next step to extend the model to core Sage Intacct implementations).
The article references Bangert “servicing more than 1,000 customers”, most likely spread across Sage 100 Contractor, Sage 300 CRE, Sage Estimating, and Sage Intacct Construction. These customers will presumably become Sage “house accounts” although the article doesn’t address that question specifically.
The Sage announcement says the move will create “new opportunities for partners”. It will be interesting to see how that pans out, given that the services the methodology purports to replace are key revenue sources for VARs.
Over the years, many ERP publishers have tried to crack the nut of accelerating time to value and minimizing the human element (and the associated costs) in implementations. Conventional wisdom has always been that every company is different and that the flexibility to handle unique needs is what makes an ERP powerful. Traditionally, these types of cookie-cutter implementations do well for less complex companies that have existing internal staff who actively manage the implementation.
It’s interesting to note that the partner perspective for Microsoft Dynamics Business Central seems to be around the revenue opportunity in the licenses being negligible – partners are encouraged to focus their efforts on industry specialization and services to customize the tools. This seems a stark contrast to Sage’s play to productize implementations.
