Besides bashing companies with channel, Epicors CEO George Klaus this week discussed the need for companies get bring in new license fees. Right now, maintenance supplies 50 percent of Epicor’s income. He’d like to see license revenue grow to 20 percent of the total. That compares with the 16.4 percent of revenue registered in the March quarter.

The outage that knocked out many of Sage's online systems, including the Sage Group and Sage North America Web sites lasted 22 hours, the company says. Sage is still working with its vendor to determine what caused the problems that started Tuesday, June 1, with systems down most of the day, and lasted well into Wednesday June 2. A notice to resellers from sales VP Paul Johnson said the outages also affected access to the Partner Portal, order-entry systems, and Accpaconline.com customers. Read more...

Epicor’s newly found (how many times is this?) belief in the channel is to use it to help with sales bandwidth as demand grows. That was the message delivered by CFO Michael Pietrini this week at the Cowen & Co. technology conference after he was questioned about why the company isn’t more aggressively cultivating a channel. Pietrini characterized the approach this way: “We have a very strong strategy for rounding out our channel.” He indicated that channel growth may be more needed internationally to deal with sales volume.