Sage News and Discussion

Sage earnings report. Notable: - reporting 600 Sage Live paid users. This seems exceptionally low given the product launched at Summit 2015. A bunch were added in the past 12 months and I'm unsure if this was through a promo but I suspect so. - 313,000 Sage One subscribers. This is the product Sage describes as functionally equivalent to QBO (which is targeted to hit a little over 2 million subscribers by Intuit's fye) - payments in NA seems to be very troubled. The only thing Sage says about it is that growth is flat. - nothing said about the new Sage Global Partner program which seems odd. Maybe Braveheart is still in Scotland sharpening his sword. - nothing much said about CPA program either - confirms 15,000 registered attendees for Summit 2016. Somehow I think that is not the same as actually attending but only Sage really knows how many badges walked the floor. - during this fiscal year the Sage focus is on new customer acquisition. Apparently last year Focus was cost and people reorg but Sage didn't elaborate. Overall these results don't seem terrible. Sage is rather safely meeting their financial forecasts which the market loves. I don't think Intuit is growing tremendously faster although QBO and their CPA mindshare in NA is definitely squeezing Sage. There were no mentions of any personnel changes though two directors resigned. The main concern with some of Sage's touted growth numbers is they are for products starting from a relatively small base - X3, Sage One. https://www.sage.com/~/media/group/files/investors/sage-results-fy16-30-november-2016.pdf

At 600 users it is not long until a new initiative will replace it...

If I were to guess they probably rebrand or merge it with Sage One. It's still the classic problem that no matter what you name it if the underlying code is different you have a harder time migrating people

FinancialForce is essentially what Sage Live should aim at. It has a tough sales cycle for new logo customers, with significant application selling. I suspect that the portion of 600 not promo were essentially small orgs just barely above QBO needs. Sage can't possibly succeed if it has no product aimed roughly at that FF segment, which includes Acumatica and under NetSuite. From what I can see, Sage thinks Live will be sold like One. When it figures out it must be sold like Acumatica, then things will get interesting.

Very big assumption @JerryNorman that Sage will ""figure it out"", especially before they rearange the deck chairs again...

In my conference call yesterday with Patrick Pando, Sage VP Cloud Sales, and Pete Potsos, National Account Manager, Sage is projecting 6,000 worldwide with 3,000 of those in the US by the end of the year. I don't think that's in a month. The 600 is actually 700 and it more than doubled in the last 3 months.

Yeah. My inner Pollyanna is refusing to update her Bayesian Priors on this subject ...

John, I'd love to see any documentation you come across regarding the sales process for Live.

@JohnHoyt , I beleive the end of the year is 9/30/17

I should know much more on the sales and implementation processes by MOTM.