Sage North America on Monday unveiled SalesLogix Today, a new CRM (customer relationship management) software-hardware appliance aimed at small businesses.

The vendor, which is partnering on the hardware side with Applianz Technologies, is including hardware system monitoring, nightly data backup and up to 30 hours of help from an administrator during the first three months of ownership.

The appliance, which includes a "full-featured" CRM application, costs US$45,887 but can be financed at zero percent in terms of one to three years. For example, it would cost $51 per user per month for 25 users on a three-year financing arrangement, Sage said. A minimum of 10 users is required.

SalesLogix Today, which is also available hosted through Sage, can be shipped and set up within 24 hours, according to the vendor.

That capability, as well as the appliance model, corresponds to market demand for systems that can go live more quickly, said Forrester Research analyst Ray Wang.

"I think we'll be seeing more bundled deployment options in the next two to three years as customers who are religiously on-premise or on-demand will want the same competitive edge in time to market," Wang said.

Indeed, IBM made a similar move recently, with the release of a hardware-software appliance for its Lotus Foundations Start collaboration software.