Sage to stop offering single accounting software packages

Sage, the
FTSE 100 business software
giant, is to undertake a massive overhaul of its business model. The group has
decided to move away from offering single products and will now focus on
providing integrated software suites.

The move will see the accounting software leader drop the ‘Line’ branding
from its products. The group’s new packages will be known as Sage 50, Sage 200
and Sage 1000. The new suites will combine various products from the Sage range,
including payroll, accounting and forecasting solutions.

The industry has been consistently urging Sage to take a more integrated
approach to its products in recent years.

Greg Ford, managing director of the Sage accountants division, said the
decision to make the change was based on intensive customer research, which
indicated that users were demanding a more integrated product.

‘Accountants and businesses are demanding integration to drive efficiency and
create more time to provide value added services,’ said Ford.

Sage has promised to increase its investment in integration by committing up
to a quarter of its research and development budget to the integration
project, and increase on the usual 5% to 10%.

In a further development Sage is planning to migrate the new Sage 50 package
to the MySQL database. Sage
recently launched a partnership with the managed open source relational database
vendor, and it hopes that the partnership will increase the number of Sage
users.

Ford also emphasised that Sage wanted to improve the way it communicated with
accountants and other clients. The reorganisation of its products and the
simplification of sales and pricing models have all been implemented to improve
this relationship.

Further reading:

Sage apologises for Line 50 problems

Sage claims results will please market

Financial software: leaders of the pack