At the Sage Summit 2015 conference today Sage today announced the general availability of Sage X3, its flagship suite of ERP applications, as a cloud offering that the company is counting on channel partners to sell.

Jean Huy, global vice president of Product Marketing for Sage, said one of the primary reasons that most IT organizations haven't moved off their existing ERP applications is that vendors have yet to offer a substantially better application experience than what they already have running on-premise. In contrast, Huy said that Sage X3 provides an ERP platform that can run in the cloud, be hosted by a third party or run on-premise.

Like all of Sage’s recent application launches, Sage X3 is optimized for mobile devices, which now need to routinely engage with ERP applications, Huy said. The days when executives primarily interacted with business software inside the office are pretty much over. In its place, Huy said, customers are looking for ERP applications that not only dramatically simplify workflow, but also be accessed easily from anywhere at any time.

Huy said Sage envisions that most customers initially will want to at least engage with X3 running in a cloud managed by Sage. But given compliance requirements and the need to manage highly distributed processes, Huy said that it’s also clear that instances of Sage X3 will become more federated over time.

As part of an effort to make it simpler for partners to support those applications, Sage plans to revamp its overall channel program in October. In the meantime, Sage this week announced it has simplified its independent software vendor (ISV) program in a way that replaces the multiple agreements it previously required spanning geographies, products and multiple business units with a single comprehensive agreement. The end goal is to make it simpler for both ISVs and the rest of the channel at large to partner with Sage.

Getting companies to upgrade their ERP software is never and easy task and the level of competition across the ERP landscape inside and out of the cloud is clearly fierce. But companies are approaching a point where legacy ERP applications can’t support how the business has evolved. That creates an opportunity for solution providers to have a conversation not so much about new software features and functions, but rather about how those companies want to actually run their business using modern application software.