The ERP battle: Jeeves vs Sage X3

In the customer segment of medium-sized organizations, the Swedish market is almost oversaturated by ERP systems. The systems that focus on this customer segment include Jeeves, Microsoft Dynamics Business Central, Epicor, SAP Business ByDesign, Sage X3, Netsuite and SAP S / 4HANA Cloud. Several of these systems offer a process coverage and functionality that is relatively similar, while there of course always are differences the further down into the details you dig and depending on which industrial vertical you consider.

Two business systems that increasingly meet in selection processes in this customer segment are Jeeves and Sage X3. If you look at process coverage, these both systems offer support for all common processes except payroll. If you look at the depth of functionality, Jeeves is more functional at the same time as the Sage X3 offers a more modern architecture and user interface.

If specific strengths for both systems are to be highlighted, it is the functional support for manufacturing organizations with extensive opportunities to configure production flows, article structures and logistics and distribution alternatives. Jeeves also offers competitive support for organizations in trade and wholesale, while Sage X3, however, has support for order and trade that goes a long way for most organizations.

If you compare the organizations behind Jeeves and Sage X3, it’s a bit like comparing David to Goliath. Jeeves with almost 30 years of history today has about 700 employees and a turnover of 900 MSEK while Sage with its 40 years has about 14,000 employees and a turnover of about 20 billion SEK. One difference between the companies, however, is that Jeeves focuses on one and the same application, while Sage (like Visma) has become a product company that offers a variety of applications for many different target groups. The product Sage X3 is the result of an acquisition carried out around 2005 when the product X3 was acquired from the French supplier Adonix.

Both systems have Europe as their primary market, but with customers in North America and a few scattered in Eastern Europe and Asia. Sage X3 with about 7,500 customers is translated into 15 languages ​​and Jeeves with about 2,500 customers is translated into 12 languages.

In terms of flexibility, both systems offer good flexibility when it comes to the customer’s opportunities to change and configure the system without creating complex or costly conditions and obstacles to ongoing upgrades. In the case of Jeeves, the interested and knowledgeable customer can on their own make very large improvements and changes in addition to the basic functionality of the system, and in the case of Sage X3, it normally requires a little more support from an implementation partner.

In terms of delivery capacity in Scandinavia, this is significantly larger with Jeeves, which has this as its home market. Sage X3 is offered and implemented in Sweden by the local partner Systemstöd and sometimes in collaboration with Avone IT. However, these companies have relatively few employees and can therefore only handle a limited number of implementations at a time.

In terms of growth, Sage is growing fastest, not least with its application Sage X3, which has received a great deal of attention and is growing internationally. Jeeves, which began an internationalization after the millennium, has instead in recent years chosen to keep pace with its internationalization.

In terms of ownership, Sage is listed on the London Stock Exchange without any owner having more than 5% ownership. Jeeves has been owned by the American venture capital company Battery Ventures since 2012 and it is easy to speculate when this investment will pass into someone else’s ownership, even though Battery Ventures has a history of being a long-term owner.

There is definitely room for both Jeeves and Sage X3 in the Scandinavian market, even though there is tough competition from many other players with a focus on the medium-sized organizations segment.

In the battle of functionality and delivery capacity, Jeeves wins over Sage X3 and the local partner Systemstöd. However, in the battle of modernity, development ability and investment capital, Sage wins the battle.