I finally made it to Sage Connections in Manchester – how it’s changed in the 10 years since I was last here. Although I missed the keynotes I managed to get a transcript and was able to do a brief Q&A around the main themes.
From a customer perspective Sage plans to:
- Focus heavily on usability and integration
- Move away from selling ‘products’ to ‘solutions’ based on customer needs
- Simplify the product naming conventions. Basically that means all reference to ‘Line’ (which I always found horrid) have been excised and some of the longer naming conventions have gone.
- Rationalise the channel so there is one throat to choke at Sage Towers rather than having to deal with multiple lines of business when buying complementary products.
- Mid-market customers will be handled by the channel
- Small business will be a direct sell
- Accountants in practice – no channel change
Paul Stobard, Sage UK’s MD said:
Integration is the most important technical challenge we face in our technology strategy.
I wouldn’t argue with that. Sage has acquired a ragbag of products over the years and while past efforts have been made to rationalise the code, very little had been done to rationalise the product lines so that customers could seamlessly add in new capability.
An interesting factoid that popped up. According to Paul, Sage spends 5-10% of it’s R&D on ‘plumbing’ of the kind necessary to make integration a reality. That is being cranked to 25% with immediate effect. I’m still critical of the company’s miserable record on R&D spend (8% total revs) but at least a good chunk of the spend is being put in the right place. More on this tomorrow when I’ve had chance to quizz Paul.
This is the best quote of the day – again from Paul:
We’re removing the need for customers to be forced into taking all Microsoft ideological technical baggage.
Fighting talk – I like it. They are talking about a deal with IBM. More again tomorrow.
PS – They’ve given me access all areas, there are 400 partners here and they’re expecting 2,000 customers and accountants on Wednesday. The auditorium is rumoured to have wifi. Woah…
Technorati Tags: innovation, integration, Sage, Sage Line 50, Sage MMS, Sage payroll
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This all sounds intriguing, particularly the product renaming. I'd definitely like to hear more about what is behind their swing away from Microsoft, and any more open source initiatives.
The downside of the increase to 25% of R&D spend on the plumbing means less resource on new functionality, but on balance I guess this is the right direction to help solve the integration issues they have.
Respect to Sage for letting you loose…!-)