Sage Summit, Day 2

 Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, writes: On the second day of the Sage Summit in Los Angeles, the focus was on Sage’s strategy and innovation. This was the theme of the keynote delivered by Pascal Houillon and Himanshu Palsule and the opening of the Sage Innovation Lab.

In the keynote, Pascal reviewed Sage’s progress in North America against their technology strategy and how Sage offers customers choice and flexibility through purposeful innovation. Over the past few years, Sage has focused on strengthening its core accounting and ERP offerings, developing new cloud solutions and introducing strong connected services to extend its desktop offerings in a hybrid cloud model. As part of this, Pascal highlighted how Sage is building on three trends to deliver their next generation of solutions:

• Extending customers’ presence in the cloud, including building on their existing investment
• Helping customers to benefit from the convergence of mobility and data
• Maintaining mission critical considerations as the foundation of all the products they build.

Himanshu picked up on these themes with live demos of some of Sage’s new cloud, mobile and business intelligence solutions. Mobile applications shown included Sage Mobile Sales, Sage Mobile Service and integration with Sage Mobile Payments, all of which are commercially available. Emphasis was also given to Sage Intelligence Go!, which is the cloud version of Sage Business Intelligence and will be commercially available in 2015.

Sage North America announced the general availability of Sage 300 Online. This is a very affordable cloud-based system ($69 per month) and is ideal for those small and midsized businesses that have outgrown their basic accounting software and are seeking an ERP solution to provide them with better integration and collaboration capabilities.

Other highlights from the floor relating to demonstrations of significant product updates included:

• Start-up and small business segment: previews in the Innovation Lab of a new Sage One mobile app for solopreneurs and of Sage 50 modernisation; and
• Mid-market segment: the upcoming launch of Sage ERP X3 Online, which takes all of the core functionality of Sage ERP X3 Version 7 to the Cloud for medium-sized businesses.