Sage is to take a suite approach to its business software, forging links between its lines to gain a larger slice of IT budgets beyond its mainstay accounting/payroll interests.

At its Connections user conference in Manchester that started yesterday, Sage said it will sharply increase its percentage of research and development spending on integration, scrap the “Line” naming convention and focus on phasing in three suites of programs that share a common look and feel.

Sage 50 will cover payroll, accounting, contact management, operations management, forecasting and reporting, and will be migrated to the open-source MySQL database to improve robustness and scalability. Sage 200 will become a business process management stack that still uses SQL Server as its database but is less dependent on Microsoft tools. The top-end Sage 1000 will become an embedded set of enterprise applications that can optionally be accessed through a browser, Microsoft Outlook or IBM’s Workplace client services.

Often regarded as a technology laggard, Sage said that it plans to broadly adopt web services in an effort to modernise its programs and improve external integration.

“We’re accelerating investment in linking between applications and also linking from applications to the outside world,” said Paul Stobart, Sage UK chief executive. “Our strategy is to open up and to have far greater utilisation of web services. We’re acknowledging some technology trends and the time is right to bring them to customers. We have to do better at cross-selling and it’s not good enough just to be in accounting and payroll.

On his AccMan blog, former accountant Dennis Howlett said the company was due an integration overhaul.

“Sage has acquired a ragbag of products over the years and while past efforts have been made to rationalise the code, very little had been done to rationalise the product lines so that customers could seamlessly add in new capability,” he wrote.

Sage will from January offer Sage 50 on a hosted basis through partners but Stobart insisted the company is not suffering at the hands of Salesforce.com, NetSuite and other on-demand players.

“The truth is that [the on-demand movement] is not affecting our market share at all,” he said. “The on-demand offerings are still held back by [lack of] functionality and usability. Customisation is really tough to do and integration is a nightmare.”
The changes will also provide the opportunity to re-jig pricing, with Stobart promising “far simpler” tariffs.