Is the merging of IntAcct and Sage 10 years too late?

Below is an announcement from Sage concerning their future direction.  After many years of keeping IntAcct and Sage products separate, they are finally merging the two entities.  Unfortunately for most of our clients and our current prospects, they are about 10 years too late.  CS3 had to  move on with an expanded product portfolio that met the expectations of the marketplace.  We are very happy with the new cloud products we have been presenting:  Scissortail HCM by UKG, formerly Kronos and Acumatica ERP.

I bring this to your attention as Sage will be very aggressive in trying to convert your Sage 100,  and Sage HRMS  to Sage Intacct and Sage People.  There are multiple reasons this will not work for most of you (no inventory for distribution, no payroll for People, etc.).  

We understand you look to us for insight and experience.  Unless you have a very short window of continuation (retiring, shutting down, etc.), you are at a strategic disadvantage with your legacy Sage products as the Sage Cloud product offerings are narrow in functionality.  If you feel your Sage product  “basically does what we need”, the lack of capabilities is keeping you from servicing your customers and employees extremely well.  Your competitors on a cloud product have a strategic advantage over you.

Change in technology is simply that, change; until a major event forces the realization new technology can allow us to do more or do it differently than before.  When the disruption forces the search for new tools, we often find the tools are available, we just did not see the need for them.  Many firms – your competition - are on the leading edge of remote worker cloud-based tools and even with COVID their business models were minimally impacted.  They saw the necessity for replacing tools to address the needs of their local, national and even world-wide employees‘ and customers‘.  CS3 had little problem serving our customers because we already had the tools in place to make it possible.  Tools others scrambled to put in place because they had not seen the need previously.

Their Statement:

Dear Partners,

Our company is at a crucial turning point where we begin to fully realize our potential in the US market. The time is right to accelerate our transition into a great SaaS company by fully combining Sage’s experience of growth at scale with Sage Intacct's high-growth cloud-native leadership. 

This morning, Sage CEO Steve Hare announced, effective October 1, we will bring together one fully integrated US go to market and one fully integrated Medium segment organization with one common purpose and one aligned channel.

‍What this means for Sage North America partners‍

This means one message to market, one unified approach to partners, and one clear focus on beating our competitors. 

Harmonizing our market and our cloud-connected and cloud teams means that when a Sage customer using Sage 50, Sage 100, or Sage 300 wants to move to the cloud, Sage Intacct will be the natural choice. And when our customers look for people management, Sage People will be there to support them.

Providing Sage-to-Sage migration will enable us to win in the market. This really is the best of both worlds—and the key to meeting our ambition of becoming a great SaaS business.

We have made some early decisions: 

• As of today, Marc Linden, Managing Director for Sage Intacct, will report to Lee Perkins and lead the unified Medium segment. Marc will also continue to lead the Sage Intacct team through the end of September. 
• Following a handover from Marc, as of October 1, Nancy Harris will lead a newly unified North America go to market, inclusive of Sage Intacct. 
• Chris Rose, SVP of Sales for Sage Intacct, will report to Nancy Harris in an expanded role leading all US Medium segment sales. 
• Reporting to Chris will be Taylor Macdonald, who runs Sage Intacct’s partner channel, and me, as I continue to lead the North America partner channel. 

Thee following colleagues will continue to lead their areas of the Medium segment: 

• Oliver Herzig – Product for BMS 
• Rob Sinfield – Product for Sage X3 
• Gaelle Bourven – Product Engineering for Sage X3 

We will keep you informed over the coming weeks as we shape the organization into a single global segment and the single US go to market team—ensuring our new ways of working are operational as we head into the new fiscal year on October 1.

‍Looking forward‍

Let me reassure you, nothing will change for our customers. However, we are sure this move will help us bring more customers onto our native cloud products as these solutions become the cloud destination for Sage customers from across the Medium segment portfolio.

We are laser-focused on our vision to become a great SaaS company and believe the changes we have made today give us the runway for success in FY21. For now, we need to stay focused on closing out FY20 strong. This is a big quarter for us and I need you to keep doing what you are doing!

Thanks for your partnership.

Nancy Teixeira
VP Partner Strategy & Sales, North America
Sage