90 Minds Community

Sage moving some employees to Atlanta? Or just shufflling existing office space? http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/blog/atlantech/2015/06/sage-software-to-bring-350-jobs-to-atlantic.html

Shifting Irvine and Richmond jobs there. May also be hiring new. They have a major love fest going for Sage Life right now. I think the new guy is betting big on Salesforce. I'm less confident that it will be the promised land. First Movers like Salesforce rarely wind up as the category leader and Sage may just find themselves hitched up to a comet that has burned it's brightest already.

Is Irvine closing or more likely this is movement/expansion in anticipation of Sage Life? To me this seems like a ""go big or go home"" strategy. What's plan B if Sage LIfe doesn't take flight?

Plan B is same as always: Step 1. New CEO Step 2. ??????? Step 3. Profit

I recall Sage having a ""jobs fair"" in mid-town Atlanta recently. - Believe it was Sage Life related.

I always thought the HQ was Irvine. Wikipedia says that too....

This is a change from May 2015 when the Sage career site identified Irvine as the headquarters

Sage ""Job Fair"" recently in Atlanta was 8 positions for Sage Life. 5 marketing, 1 Business Development, 1 Sales Mgr, 1 Account Executive.

All Sage Life

The new guy moves quick. Quicker than the social media team apparently. I think the math is straight forward here. California + liberal pro-employee employment laws + higher cost of living in SoCal + higher salaries in SoCal + huge existing office space in Atlanta + huge number of existing employees in Atlanta (including precious renewals team) = see ya later Irvine. I'm surprised it wasn't done previously except for the fact that, oh yeah, when NA called it's own shots, no CEO wanted to live in Atlanta. Just my two cents.

That makes sense. I think we are seeing a swing away from Sage100/MAS90 as one of the top products. I can't see how it hurts Irvine employment all that much. Most of the top Sage 100 people have been gone for quite some time.

At least I still have Acumatica that's in the same time zone and is . . . relevant.

Wait - so you are stating that Acumatic can smash down walls between front and back office? I'd like to see that because to my knowledge only Sage Life can do that!

Do we know if Irvine is closing? Or at least downsizing?

My guess is it's going to be shuttered. Too far for the new boss to fly.

Atlanta is a great place to live... just saying.

1. Watch where Jodi spends most of her time. 2. If you want to kill a new product in its crib, locate it with the legacy operations. >>> Sage Life planted elsewhere. 3. I'm with Peter in comments about salesforce.

I can't think that Jodi is more than interim....

I am sure she's interim too. I suspect part of the reason she's here is that Sage think it will take some time to find a replacement; would YOU take a job like that? So part of her task must be troubleshooting and stabilization, to make it easier to sell the position to the next candidate. Much of this conversation is no moot. Georgia announced that Sage is planting its NA HQ in Atlanta. So Irvine will be just a tech dev and support site (no real tech jobs mentioned in the list).

Jodi already has FU money. I doubt she'd sign on just to be a rent-a-president (again).

I found her decision a bit odd, too, for that reason. Why do you think she's back?

She is either going to become NA group President within a defined period or she has been charged with getting the NA products together for eventual sale. Every one of Sage's recent strategic moves (all directed from UK BTW) have been to the lower end of the market. This is a ""go big or go home"" strategy. If it doesn't produce results within the typical 3 year window that a new CEO is provided - we will likely see another CEO and another cycle. Kelly is on his three year window to show results or go home. I don't think that selfies and Twitter are going to save him if revenues don't increase materially.

Why would ""become NA group President within a defined period"" even be on the table? UK knows here, and she knows how Sage was 5 yrs ago. I'd be surprised if she couldn't have performed her own adequate due diligence from her network before signing on. During Sage CRM's bootcamp in Feb, CRM Execs referred to Sage NA as ""just our NA distributor."" It may be true, but I find the wording odd, unless they expect to perhaps add a distributor sometime.

Thinking more about that, the move of the new product focus to Atlanta produces maybe 2 HQ's, with one appropriate for Brave New World, and one for spin off. Again, I'd like to know which location she spends more time in. She would be an ideal leader of a VC buyout. The window for big buyout deals will be closing in the near future as debt interest rates rise from the subbasement. All of the products would probably increase R&D if they could just use the funds they generate. But the competitive environment is much worse now than a couple years ago for an aging product line trying to rewrite.