Over the last two years, Sage has worked to categorize products more clearly, putting some, such as Sage Pro and Timeslips, in the value division. In May, the company also chose worldwide products, Accpac ERP, X3 ERP and Sage CRM and SalesLogix. These are products that would likely be used by companies with different sites in a variety of countries, and have multi-lingual and multi-currency capabilities.

Among issues to be defined are how to support global products, including putting together pricing for installations that span geographies while also fitting the product to the needs of different countries. For example, that could involve an end-user company in the United States that has operations in the United Kingdom and Germany and coordinating sale and installation at all sites, instead of having different Sage units in those countries making that effort on their own.

The least known product in the global group is X3 ERP, a manufacturing package that come into the Sage product lineup with the purchase of Adonix, a company based in France. It has been sold primarily direct, but Sage intends to change that, according to sales VP Paul Johnson. "Our X-3 growth is going to come from our partners. We are looking at larger partners that can afford the investment and desire to make the investment," he says. Sage will probably have a channel of about 10 X3 resellers in the United States. The current dealers include Blytheco the national reseller based in Laguna Hills, Calif., and SoftwareLink, based in Atlanta. Johnson says Sage is looking for larger VARs and is considering both Sage resellers and dealers who handle other product lines.

In a joint interview at Insights, Johnson and Tom Miller, VP of channel development, said X3 is a program that can be highly competitive against products such as Microsoft's Dynamics AX. Miller said the product scales upwards very well and "is very complete from a competitive standpoint."

The two also indicated that Sage will put more resources behind MIP, the company's nonprofit accounting package. With the NFP market growing, Sage probably needs resellers to provide more complete geographical coverage. Miller said that "you can argue that MIP is the market leader" in its market.

Another product area getting attention is the payments division, which was a high profile area when Sage acquired the former Verus in 2006. At that time, former CEO Ron Verni talked about getting ERP VARs into the payment processing business in order to provide them with a stream of income from the transaction-based revenue generated from the unit. However, Swenson said while there was talk about getting the units to work together from the leadership, there had been little cooperation at the lower levels needed to coordinate the efforts.

"We are very pleased with the progress we made last year," Swenson said. One reason for integrating software products with payment processing is that "the early indication is that customers tend to be with us longer when they have a payment solution," she said. Sage has grown the sale of payment processing to the installed based by 300 percent over the prior year, although is still apparently a small number. Swenson said the company is working to simplify the integration during 2010 and also said Sage also plans "to expand the capability of payment solutions to be more than payment processing." She declined to give details.