Sage North America yesterday announced the results of its mobile device survey, which recently polled 490 small and midsize businesses (SMBs) in the United States. The Sage SMB Survey on Mobile Devices showed that employees accessed work-related information when they were not in the office most commonly using laptops (80 percent) and smartphones (81 percent), followed by tablets (57 percent).

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After engaging in a soul-searching exercise a while back, which has lately resulted with more coherent strategies in some regions, and with the recent public statement of its commitment to making customers happy, Sage Group announced at the opening of trading at the London Stock Exchange on February 15, 2013, that it has reached a definitive agreement to sell Sage Nonprofit Solutions to Accel-KKR, and ACT! and SalesLogix to Swiftpage. Accel-KKR has extensive expertise in accelerating the growth of software companies in vertical industry segments, KANA Software being one example. The investment firm brings a wealth of operational best practices and strategic insight to its portfolio companies and is a good partner to help these businesses reach their full potential.

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2012 was a whirlwind year of influences on the business landscape—some of them good and some of them not so good. The fiscal cliff, the U.S. presidential election, an anemic economic recovery, the debt ceiling and proposed sequestration cuts, along with Hurricane Sandy’s effects on business are a few things that come to mind. But despite the ever-changing business landscape, one central tenet always rings true: keep your customers happy.

Sage’s professed focus has for some time been the customer experience, and the company has done a number of things in the last year to further its goals in this regard. We talked to Joe Langner, executive vice president of mid-market solutions at Sage North America, about what Sage has learned in this arena, and what the company is planning for 2013 to continue following this mantra. While Sage is a large company with over 6 million customers worldwide, many of the lessons it has learned can easily be applied to any business—small or large, in services or manufacturing, bricks-and-mortar or ecommerce.

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Sage Group plc is a leading global provider of business management software to small and medium-sized companies, with over 6 million customers and more than 13,500 employees in 24 countries covering the UK and Ireland, mainland Europe, North America, South Africa, Australia, Asia, and Brazil. After recently streamlining and rebranding its ERP and CRM offering in North America, Sage recently announced the formation of a new organization to drive its growth across the European mid-market. The organization, which is in place from January 2013 and is led by Christophe Letellier, will be aligned behind Sage’s flagship solution, Sage ERP X3, and other local mid-market offerings.

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On December 13, 2012, Sage North America announced the availability of Sage 500 ERP 2013 (formerly Sage ERP MAS 500). The product’s new features and enhancements, and new mobile and cloud services, aim to help midsize customers increase productivity, simplify processes, and reduce costs across their business.

Enterprises can now save time navigating processes with Visual Process Flows, which demonstrate the steps of a process in visual terms, while also including links to the various tasks along the way. Visual Process Flows were originally developed for the top of the range Sage ERP X3 product, but are now a common component in all Sage’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions.

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Part 1 of this series analyzed the transformative events during the last few years at Sage Group, Plc (LSE: SGE) and its Sage North America subsidiary. These changes have led to its analyst day in Boston in February 2011, where Sage took a giant leap towards clarifying its position in the market. The analyst day started with Sage Group’s CEO Guy Berruyer’s and the outgoing Sage North America’s CEO Sue Swenson’s reports on their respective companies’ current state of affairs.

Part 2 talked about the subsequent presentation by Himanshu Palsule, Executive Vice President of Product Strategy and Marketing of Sage North America’s Business Solutions, on Sage North America’s strategic “Extend, Connect, Grow” framework and related Web strategy. In this presentation, Sage espoused somewhat differing cloud computing approaches for the small business and core mid-market segments.

But how do Sage customers and partners fit within the “Extend, Connect, Grow” strategic pillars?

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Part 1 of this series analyzed the transformative events during the last few years at Sage Group, Plc (LSE: SGE) and its Sage North America subsidiary. These changes have led to the company’s analyst day held in Boston in February 2011, where Sage took a giant leap towards clarifying its position in the market.

The analyst day started with Sage Group’s CEO Guy Berruyer’s and outgoing Sage North America’s CEO Sue Swenson’s reports on their respective company’s current state of affairs. As the summary of both leaders’ presentations, Sage remains passionate about its customers and has been expanding connected (cloud-based software) services and online solutions to provide choices. Read the rest of this entry »

I often wonder how well-known is the fact that the Newcastle upon Tyne (UK)-based Sage Group, Plc (LSE: SGE) is a leading global provider of business management software and services to over 6.3 million small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) worldwide. After over 25 years in existence and with 13,400 employees worldwide, Sage reported US$2.24 billion in revenue in 2010, and the vendor touts its 28,000 business partners and 40,000 accountants’ club members.

For its part, the Sage North America subsidiary (formerly also known as Best Software in the early 2000s) has 4,000 employees and supports more than 3.2 million customers in the United States (US) and Canada (with customers in every state and province) with enterprise applications and services that cover accounting, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), payment processing, human resources (HR) and payroll. In addition to providing horizontal products, Sage North America caters to the specialized needs of the healthcare, nonprofit, manufacturing, and construction & real estate industries.

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