Sage News and Discussion

Sage Strategies I've been communicating with Tim Sullivan (now back at Microsoft), and he believes the major move to Atlanta is a good decision. Since the UK is visibly controlling now, I tend to agree, providing a more central location. Tim also mentioned Sage should divest FAS, HRMS and CRE. CRE every year achieves at least one of the top sales awards, but at President's Circle, they really seem to keep to themselves for the most part and are like a separate company. I had questions from Sage executives about selling and success of HRMS to our 100 customers, so it seems to be on their minds. And as we all experience, FAS and HRMS seem to act very differently from the ERP divisions, and have never really merged their processes. It was interesting that the UK representative attending President's Circle was Martyn Lambert, Director of Strategy and Innovation. He was on his way following the meeting to Atlanta for 10 days, so he seems to be an important advisor to Stephen Kelly. I had a discussion with him about Sage Live, which he is very enthusiastic about. He will also be attending Summit.

Sage doesn't want to hear this news, but any add-on, whether it's Sage or some third party is only viable if it doesn't require an engineering degree to install, maintain and configure. I noticed you did not include or mention CRM. The only piece that's not ""divestable"" would be ERP? Essentially Sage spent millions (hundreds of millions?) in a failed attempt to integrate a myriad of acquired products. So my question is if you divest FAS, HRMS and CRE - why not ERP as well? In my view, Sage holds products largely on the hope that they are good for cross-selling. I think we've seen that once the low-hanging fruit has been picked off the cross-sell tree that there's not much follow-on. Unfortunately, I think the current primary reason for Sage NA to exist is, as pointed out at the very start of the SOTA -> Best -> Sage transformation, Sage NA is a cash cow (admittedly with declining revenues) that is used by Sage UK as more of an investment vehicle than a technology company. WAG - the only product that may produce material revenues in new sales is X3 though even that is far from assured.

I think they would have serious problem unloading HRMS. Can of worms.