Sage News and Discussion

Sage announces HY (Half Year) results ending 3/31/14. They talk about statutory (GAAP) v Organic (non-GAAP) and almost exclusively trumpet organic results. In prior years' reports I believe Sage have defined organic to exclude non-core products. This year the organic definition is more broad and says that it just excludes products held for eventual sale. North America statutory revenue -- (11%) --- Sage overall revenues (7%) Sage X3 revenues up 7% though expected double digit growth Recurring revenues to Sage now make up 72% of revenue There's a note in the financials about only starting to count subscriptions if they are tied to software where the user cannot keep using the product if they stop paying. I wonder if that's a clue that a change to NA subscription policies may be in the cards with perhaps expiring registration keys? Here's the full report: http://www.sage.com/investors/regulatory-announcements/2014/05/08/half-yearly-report

Considering they are putting 95% of their net new marketing and recruiting effort into X3 and are growing the var base FAR faster than 7%, this is scary bad. I would have expected 30% plus considering the base is statistically low

I think the performance of X3 has resulted in two departures in NA (Sullivan and Pietrick). Agree this is not good. Also the press largely just reprints the press releases and does not really understand the fundamentals.

In general 'the press' rarely investigates anything anymore. There are very few Woodward & Bernsteins any more. They are just mouthpieces for whoever is feeding them info (unless of course its a Republican...oops, sorry couldn't help myself :) ) The financial press when covering technology companies are so caught up in the Gartner/Forrester sphere of illusion. Back when Epicor 9 first shipped and it made MAS90 for Windows Circa 1995 look like bulletproof software, none of the press or analysts said boo. Or when guys like Dennis Howlett become just a mouthpiece for all things SAP and was raving about Business By Design when everybody knew it was a steaming pile just goes to prove the point.

Netsuite could ship the next version looking like Quickbooks 1.0 via a PCAnywhere application, and the press would eat it up.

PDF of today's press release