Voices

Sage Talks Marketing Strategy

Five trends are shaping the software market from a customer perspective, according to Sage executives.

During a press briefing here at the Sage Summit in Atlanta, Himanshu Palsule, executive vice president of Sage’s Business Solutions Division, discussed the company’s product and marketing strategy.

Business analytics, globalization, the mobile workforce, social media and cloud computing are growing trends affecting customers.

“The vision is to take advantage of these trends without disrupting our current customers,” he said.

Palsule also talked about the investments his company plans for the next fiscal year, which include increasing business partner skills, competencies and productivity; improving new customer acquisition channel marketing; and refining business partner measurements and compensation.

Sage works with more than 27,000 reseller partners and more than 40,000 accountants worldwide, said Palsule. Eighty-four percent of Sage’s customer base of approximately 4.8 million users is at the entry level, or small businesses.

The company’s long-term goals are to be a key leader in all markets globally, be recognized as one of the most admired employers and experience superior organic revenue growth.

“We have a very diverse portfolio and that is our strength,” Palsule said.

He also addressed whether the company is moving toward cloud computing and a more subscription-based model.

“Subscription pricing doesn’t have to be limited to cloud,” he said. “There is no reason traditional or premise software can’t offer that. We understand cloud computing. What we are unwilling to believe is that the entire world of computing is moving into the cloud. We need to take advantage of that deployment option [and] we are an on-premise provider with an increasing array of cloud products.”

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