Wayne, I looked at these, and listened to parts of the audio. Very interesting, but not in a good way. The last half of the audio was really interesting. My observations;
1) I hadn't realized that the French had taken over. Although Guy's English is much better than Pascal's, I do hope they don't use him in other presentations; ""wooden"" and ""boring"" are adjectives that come to mind. I know there's a protocol to these earnings presentations, but he could enhance confidence by spicing up the presentations. see m62.com for example.
2) They lied about ""premium support."" Nowhere in the presentation or q&a did they mention that premium support growth was at 60% because customers didn't have an option. Similarly, nobody grilled them on why 81% renewal rate should raise questions about success of subscription models. Also, I had not realized that Pascal's claim to fame was the premium support takeover in France. Given this, there was no choice at all about modifying anything in the US version.
3) all 4 of the major biz units (NA, UK, Spain, France) had new Presidents in the past 18 mo. So all are happy about playing the same sheet music because they were hired to do so. Guy emphasized advantages in increased central control of strategy and ops.
It raises again the mystery of why Sue Swenson suddenly retired. I think she decided when she was passed over for the top Sage Group job. She understood the implications and didn't want to take orders in that direction. (Less charitably, she didn't want to be absorbed by the Borg.
4) Multi-tenancy. They do not intend to design the mid-market products for multitenancy databases. They say it's to permit customization. While I completely understand the concern, I think they underestimate current and near-future technology opportunities.
Guy also talked about ""multi-tenancy data"" which I have no idea what that is. Regardless, Sage is going to do it.
5) Guy claims that his primary KPI for the future is the customer NPS. Great. He didn't say what Sage's current NPS are, nor what the competition's are. We'll see if that get mentioned again next year.
6) I didn't any comparison to competition or the larger market at all. In my experience a sure sign that the company is losing market share.
This presentation qualifies as porcine lipstick.