Voices

Sage Goes Bilingual

Sage North America is taking a fresh look at its accounting software product line and moving some of the products across international borders to expand their potential customer base.

Among the recent émigrés was Sage’s Simply Accounting. Not long ago, the small business software was mostly marketed in Canada as Sage’s northern answer to Peachtree in the U.S. However, the company has discovered fresh demand for the software’s bilingual capabilities.

Sage’s senior director of partner programs, Jennifer Warawa, told me Wednesday that the company has seen great demand for the product in the Hispanic market in the U.S., so it has been marketing it here as a bilingual accounting product with multicurrency capabilities. However, there’s a twist. Up in Canada, Simply Accounting is sold as an English-French product, whereas in the U.S., it’s English-Spanish (or maybe just Spanglish for short).

I asked whether there were plans to make it speak three languages so users could switch between English, French and Spanish. Apparently there are no such plans afoot, but some customers out there could probably use such a system.

Another recent transplant to U.S. shores is Sage X3, which is coming along with new Sage America CEO Pascal Houillon as he steps into the shoes of retiring CEO Sue Swenson. Houillon was formerly CEO of Sage France, and the company plans to make the most of Sage X3, which is being positioned at the upper end of the market against enterprise resource planning software from the likes of German software giant SAP. For its part, SAP has been trying to move downmarket to appeal to smaller companies in the U.S.

It looks like it will be France vs. Germany for the World Cup of accounting software right here in the U.S. Can anyone say, “Goal!”?

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