90 Minds Community

I wait with great anticipation... ""What is Wayne going to say about this..."" Sage organizational announcement Pascal Houillon is leaving Sage, effective immediately, to pursue other opportunities to broaden his career. We thank Pascal for his many contributions to Sage and wish him great success. To ensure we remain focused on delivering our FY15 commitments, an interim leader will be appointed while we conduct an external search for the full time president of Sage North America. In the meantime, please reach out to me directly if you have any questions or concerns. Sage demonstrated good progress with the H1 FY2015 results announced today, and I want to personally thank you for all your hard work. It is imperative that we continue to focus on customer success and delivering results. As always, we are committed to helping you grow your business with Sage, and I am excited about the opportunities ahead. Best regards, Rich Spring EVP and Chief Revenue Officer Sage North America

@JaniceHaywood I posted this earlier on the Sage LinkedIN Group Make no mistake - although Sage have buried this news on page 3 of their 6 month financial results press release - this management change in North America has the potential to produce drastic change - both in product strategy and leadership. Sage have already gone through years of rotating in (and out) EVP and VP level executives. If it were possible to produce acceptable growth merely through price hikes and margin cuts - it would have happened in NA by now. The focus on X3 has produced the effect we all should have been able to predict. Sales of X3 up 36% organically in NA while SSRS for SMB is down 3%. Shift attention from one product to another = shift (some) results from one product to another. There's not enough detail to know exactly which products in NA are ""doing well"". It's a fair bet that whoever takes the lead in NA will come in much wiser knowing what hasn't worked. As a result I expect that NA will see more drastic changes that what we've witnessed over the past 5 years - including close looks at the existing product lines which whether some should be sold. It's a sure bet that the mid-market is not going to get any less competitive. I'm just returning from the IT Alliance conference in Ponte Verda where one vendor demonstrated (3x that I saw) taking their SaaS solution and connecting it -- using a borrowed laptop from the audience -- to Microsoft Power BI and creating real time business intelligence charts. When is the last time we've had that level of simplicity in making integrations between Sage products ? Increasingly customers don't want to wrestle with confusing licensing , incompatible desktop DLL's and proprietary tools. This is one area that I think the ""new Sage"" is going to need to pay some attention to or they may wind up reinventing the past while SaaS competitors continue having lunch at Sage's expense.

https://www.linkedin.com/grp/post/106271-6001648938581577729

It was done unceremoniously ... kind of like a restaurant dumping out the trash in the late hours of the night. No one cares to see the trash get dumped. Everyone knows the trash had no purpose in the first place. It just stunk up the place while it was lingering around - doing nothing useful. Maybe it was actually harmful because no one wants smelly trash sitting in a restaurant - it drives away the good customers as they start to talk about how disgusting the restaurant is and they stop showing up for dinner. Pretty soon the restaurant is in shambles and the waitstaff - who serve the customers for the good of the restaurant - are being blamed. The smart waitstaff begin to work part-time shifts at better restaurants that don't stink so much. Some of them might even cut back their shifts at the smelly restaurant and start focusing on the nice restaurants who treat their waitstaff with opportunities, respect, and a non-smelly environment. That's just a metaphor. Don't read too much in to it. I'm sure any new trash is going to smell worse.

Wayne's analysis of the 6-month report is cogent and useful. I can't come up with a strategy for them to ""fix"" SMB in NA. It is too late. My interpretation is that they bet 4 yrs ago on mobile and credit card servicing as a way to create real growth in the legacy apps while Sage One and X3 finished out. Then they thought those 2 would be able to take over. Not only did they completely underestimate the technology development needed for mobile, S1 and X3, but they managed to encourage the more tech-savvy customers to leave through their arrogant support pricing and paper-thin software enhancements. Then they pissed off the SPS operation by first attempting to lock out competitors and now cutting loose SPS' well-connected sales force to work for the competition. Hamanshu is in charge of engineering in NA, so if he isn't axed it will only because Sage has no other person who understands enough technology to help guide the changes needed. Langner was cut, probably because he screwed up the subscription value equation and completely dropped significant efforts at new Sage 100 sales. I wouldn't be surprised if the trigger for Pascal was seeing the aftermath of his decision to fire the SPS sales team. Sage 100's code base, Providex, is non-standard. So it's hard to see how they can accelerate new functionality and/or fixes to embarassments (the current Paperless Office). Sage 300 doesn't have enough functionality to really take over for Sage 100. Finally, NA is clearly puppeteered by UK. What skilled executive would want a job with a company that is in a product-line cul de sac, and with no real local authority? This great drama to watch unfold while we build our strategies to decouple our success from Sage's fortunes.