Sage makes life easier with one-for-all division
Sage overhauls both its UK team's structure and product branding in an attempt to avoid future confusion
Accounting software giant Sage has restructured its UK channel team to simplify communication with partners, and has merged its flagship product sets.
At its Connections conference in Manchester last week, which for the first time incorporated delegates from the developer, reseller and end-user communities at the same event, the vendor announced a raft of changes to its general strategy.
Speaking to CRN, Brendan Flattery, managing director of Sage’s mid-market division, said: “We have restructured our mid-market division to make doing business with Sage easier for partners. Now, for the first time, partners will deal with one division for everything. We have already received plenty of positive feedback.”
In addition, Sage is scrapping the ‘Line’ brand name, Flattery said, instead phasing in three different suites.
“We recognise that because we have an extensive range of software that has come about through in-house development and acquisition, this hss sometimes caused confusion among both our partners and customers. This brand refresh will hopefully erase that confusion and help us win more business,” he added.
The first, Sage 50, will cover payroll, accounting, contact and operations management, forecasting and reporting and it will be migrated to the open-source MySQL database to improve scalability.
Sage 200 will be a business process management stack that uses SQL Server as its database, but is less dependent on Microsoft. Finally, the top-end Sage 1000 will become an embedded set of enterprise applications that can be accessed through a browser, Microsoft Outlook or IBM’s Workplace client services.
Flattery added that the vendor is planning to increase its R&D spend on products from its current 15 per cent of its overall budget to 20 per cent.
Richard Sharman, managing director of Sage reseller Accounting Technology, said: “These changes are only just happening, so it is very early days. However , the indications are that the changes make sense and everything looks very good.”
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