Sage to Start Building Accountant Products

Sage North America has officially put together Sage Accountant Solutions, a new business focused on building accountant-specific products and overseen by Jennifer Warawa, who was recently named vice president and general manager of the group.

Warawa had overseen much of the Sage Accountant Network efforts in her roles as VP partner programs and channel sales and senior director of partner programs. The SAN has been more focused on advocating Sage products for accountant clients, and will continue to do so according to Warawa. However, the new Sage business will focus on delivering products specifically for accountants, the first of which will be a version of Sage One for accountants that will be rolled out later this month.

“Under the SAN, we did help different product lines connect to accountants and we also had customer facing solutions, but being the connector wasn’t fulfilling whole vision,” said Warawa. “We needed products for [accountants], so once we had the product management and R&D in place we were ready to go. We are now building solutions for accountants, we have the R&D, the marketing and everything in place to do it. That is what I am overseeing. This new business is a whole, stand-alone business for products for accountants.”

She also noted that after the roll out of the accountant version of Sage One – Sage’s small business focused cloud accounting product here in the U.S. – there will be more accountant-centric products to be announced by the annual Sage Summit meeting next summer.

Another task in her charge, she said would be working more closely with Sage’s accountant efforts in other countries, as well as focusing on improving the speed at which products are presented to the market.

“The markets have become very similar with accountants in other countries, will definitely see an increased ramp up on global level. We will become a more global player in the accountant arena for sure,” said Warawa. “My priority now is speed of execution, so what you will see from Sage is getting the right products in the right hands. The market is changing quickly as is the competitive landscape, we will move much faster.”

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