Infor, an enterprise business software company, announced plans to buy Saleslogix a CRM vendor from Swiftpage, who also own Act!, the customer and contact manager. Act! was not part of the deal.
Saleslogix offers on-premises, mobile and cloud solutions.
R Ray Wang, who is founder and principal at Constellation Research says Saleslogix is a decent product, but it’s been shuffled about from company to company over the years. Saleslogix and Act!, were first purchased by Sage in 2001. Sage sold the pair of companies to Swiftpage in 2013 and it turned around and sold it to Infor today.
He said Saleslogix turned out to be a bit too enterprise-y for Sage. They really want Act!, but they ended up dumping the two products. “What happened was that the product didn’t fit with where Sage was going,” Wang explained.
He said Swiftpage put Act! in the Amazon cloud, but didn’t really capitalize on the Saleslogix, which was always left behind the market leaders Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics. Again, he said it was a decent product, but Saleslogix wasn’t really given the resources to compete.
John Oechsle, CEO and President of Swiftpage says the company liked what Saleslogix gave it, but ultimately wants to focus on it’s core smaller business market with Act!. “Swiftpage’s core DNA, even prior to the addition of Act! and Saleslogix, has been serving the micro and small business community. Working in the enterprise space has been fantastic and Saleslogix is an amazing platform, but ultimately Swiftpage is best positioned for future success by focusing on our core micro and small business customers,” Oechsle said.
With this move, they might have found a more suitable home. Wang told me that Saleslogix fills in a missing CRM piece in the Infor sales and marketing product group, but they face an uphill battle in a market dominated by the two big players.
But as Oechsle says, “Infor provides the size, scale and resources that can help position Saleslogix as a leading product in the global marketplace.”
Wang pointed out that Infor has a Salesforce CRM integration tool called Inforce, but that not all of their customers want to use Salesforce. He believes the two products can live together and it gives Infor a more complete set of CRM product offerings.
What’s more, he says this gives them a more vertical solution and that should appeal to their broad set of vertical markets, which include healthcare, pharma, hospitality and so forth.
He wouldn’t speculate if Infor would try to go head to head with the bigger counterparts in the CRM space, but he said it’s possible that they could try to focus on certain niche markets to find a place that’s separate from the big players.