Sage announced several product revamps to kick off the 2015 Sage Summit Tuesday, including Sage X3 in the cloud, an update of Sage ERP X3 that’s also available on-premise, and Sage Live, formerly known as Sage Life and developed in partnership with Salesforce.
In conjunction with these product releases, Sage stressed “the death of ERP,” which chief technology officer and head of strategy Himanshu Palsule explained was an outdated term for Sage’s flagship enterprise solution.
The vocabulary reflects Sage X3’s function as a business processes and performance tool for growing midsized businesses, while its flexibility to be used either on-premise or in the cloud follows the company’s current customer strategy.
“Sage loves on-premise,” Sage CEO Stephen Kelly told the conference crowd in his opening keynote. “Sage loves hybrid. Sage loves the cloud. Sage will not force you to migrate.”
Palsule echoed this sentiment, explaining that small business customers not yet ready for the cloud can customize their technology roadmap around Sage’s range of solutions.
“If you’re in love with your current Sage product, we don’t want to disrupt that romance,” he said, explaining “we helped invent on-premise, so we know why you love it so much.”
Sage X3 offers three options for deployment: on-premise on a customer’s infrastructure, as a service in Amazon Web Services managed by Sage, or as a service hosted on the cloud of a Sage partner. Written in HTML5, X3 can be accessed directly on mobile.
With these choices, customers “control the pace of migration to the cloud, should you choose to,” Kelly explained. Sage is intent on removing what Kelly deemed “technology disruption anxiety” for customers, though Sage Live was built for a specific point of transformation, “smashing down the wall between the front and back office.”
“At the heart of Sage Live is a real-time accounting engine built for small and medium businesses, capturing data at the source,” explained Emile Karam, vice president of product management. “The data entry happens in the background.”
Built on Salesforce’s enterprise platform-as-a-service Salesforce1, Sage Live was
Originally conceived in January, Sage Live is now generally available in the U.S. and will go live in the U.K. and Ireland by the end of the summer. Sage is offering a “rescue package” for QuickBooks customers that wish to migrate their QuickBooks data at no charge.
Sage also announced the modernization of Sage 100 and 300, going live in October as 100c and 300c with the “c” signifying “connected, collaborative, customer-focused.”
Across the product line, Palsule explained, Sage is focusing on “the golden triangle” of accounting, payroll and payments while simplifying the software and centralizing workflow.
Sage Live is available on subscription starting at $15 per month per business user and $30 per month per full user for the Sage Live Essential package. More information on Sage X3, including pricing, is available
