What's wrong with the Sage CRM business?

There seemed to be some good news about Sage's CRM proudcts at the company's recent Insight's conference, and some nice write-ups from the gurus like Denis Pombriant and Paul Greenberg. So how come nobody is buying the products?

Take a look at this:

Now, what are you looking at?

• This is total annual revenue for Sage's CRM business, both before and after acquisition. By Sage CRM in this case I mean the revenue from all the CRM products (ACT!, SalesLogix, Sage CRM, SageCRM.com), not just the individual product that caries that name.


• Interact Commerce was acquired after the end of its 2000 fiscal year. The blue bars represent the revenue performance of Interact as an independent company. Nice growth of 197% in that last year, on revenue of $107 million.


• From the close of the acquisition in May of 2001 and through the end of Sage's FY07 (10/1/06 to 9/30/07) it had managed to build a CRM business of 66.4 million British Pounds. Using the exchange rate as of 9/30/07 that translates to about $135 million dollars.


• Sage's CRM business got a small inorganic revenue bump from a small bit of CRM revenue gained with the acqusition of Accpac in 2004. Even including these revenues this works out to a seven year CAGR of just over 3%.

Wow! What happened?