Earlier today, Paul Martin, exec chairman of Sage’s BI division led me through a demonstration of Sage’s new Intelligent Reporting (IR) application, due for release in March. This is the development outcome of Sage’s 2004 acquisition of a ‘grown up’ BI toolset that has been productised for the Line 50 community.
This was very much a ‘first looks’ preview which emphasised ease of use integration to its main money spinning accounting product. Out the box, Sage provides a long list of standard reports – so what you might think – I can get a lot of this out of Excel. Not with the kind of ease Sage is promising. IR looks like an Excel add-in so has immediate appeal.
Where Sage hopes to score is in effectively eliminating the pivot table and presentation nightmare that comes from providing Excel based management reports to different types of user. Offline, I’d asked David Carter for an opinion. He believes IR needs to be a no-brainer for the S-end user in the SMB market. I concur. On the basis of what I saw, the product fulfills that requirement.
Reports are clean, logical and drillable, with good visual signposting for end users. I was a little confused over the colour scheme used to indicate drillable figures but that’s maybe more to do with my eyesight than Sage’s choice of scheme, which follows the ‘cool blue XP’ theme currently in vogue.
Management reporting is as variable as the number of industry segments yet Sage has done a good job of providing easy customisations. More important, it has taken the pain out of loading data into OLAP style analysis cubes. For the small business, IR relies on Microsoft’s CAB file format while for larger companies, there is an option to report against MS SQL Server.
There is an issue over taxonomy – who know what ‘measures’ are? Sage plans to provide alternative descriptions for certain attributes (taxonomy again?!) in 2007. Depending on how far practitioners wish to take this product, I anticipate there will be a training requirement but Sage says it’s producing a series of AVI files as part of the help system to get them going.
At a list price of £495 single user + £100 for additional users, IR is a no-brainer for practitioners and should be attractive for many other Line 50 users. It is a much better alternative than constructing Excel models and a country mile better than Excel add-ins for competitor products.
I’ve complained for years that accounting packages are like appetizers – they get you in the mood but don’t deliver satisfaction of themselves. You need the satisfaction of the main course. That’s what reporting tools deliver to you, clients and their extended community.
I’m keenly aware practitioners are looking for complementary revenue streams and IR fulfills that requirement because it opens the door for value-add business advisory services. But I wonder to what extent can Sage persuade its 160K Line 50 customers of the need for this level of sophistication. During the discussion, we tossed a few numbers around but in truth, no-one really knows what take-up will be like. In my view, practitioners hold the key as they are best placed to sell this into clients. It will be a case of ramping practice marketing.
At this stage, Sage has got it about right. Despite the price point, my one caveat is the lock-in that comes with the product because it is specifically designed to work with Line 50. I believe there is a wider opportunity to add both non-Sage users plus Line 50 users but that may require a rejigging of Line 50′s product’s pricing and positioning. There is of course the challenge this represents for SaaS vendors who are currently emerging as a new force in commoditised applications and who deliver transaction based reporting. But they have alternatives is the nascent BI services market.
I will provide an update, once I’ve seen more, learned more about the help system, had a deeper dive and when I’ve got more information about the go to market strategy. In the meantime, I’d recommend taking a look – you might be pleasantly surprised.
