Sage Live Launches on Salesforce AppExchange

Sage Software on Wednesday announced that it has launched Sage Live on the Salesforce AppExchange marketplace.

Sage Live, built on the Salesforce AppCloud, gives small businesses real-time data connecting CRM, accounting and financial data, and can scale with a business.

It works with thousands of third-party apps through real-time integrations and APIs so it can be completely customized, the company said.

“The strength of its product is its integrateability with other apps, especially those on the AppExchange, which number in the thousands,” remarked Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research Group.

It can be run on smartphones, tablets and other supported devices.

“Given the breadth and popularity of AppExchange, it’s a great platform to gain exposure for a new cloud application,” said Rebecca Wettemann, VP of research atNucleus Research.

What Sage Live Offers

Sage Live gives users one integrated accounting system of record in the cloud. It offers real-time accounting and can be scaled up or down as needed.

Users can integrate their preferred Web and mobile apps into the application.

Sage Live offers three levels of service: Essentials for one company; Standard for up to 10 companies, and Premium for up to 100 companies. The service levels give up to two, five and 10 users, respectively, anytime access to admin help.

Under these plans, business users who run their businesses from their mobile devices will pay from US$15 to $35 per user per month, billed annually. Full users — those who manage and personalize their Sage Live solution and use Sage Live at the office and on mobile devices — are charged $30 to $95 per user per month, billed annually.

Premium service comes with the premium support plan. Users at the other two levels of service can pay $10 per full user per month, billed annually, to take the optional upgrade to the Premium support plan.

“Sage Live appears to be a just-right solution that’s easy to adopt by a small company but still delivers important value by integrating access to the multiple data sets every company has,” Beagle Research Group’s Pombriant told CRM Buyer.

It “gives companies a much-needed entry into cloud computing, and it helps SMBs adapt to business processes conducted from mobile devices that can be used by customers as well as managers,” he said.

Sage Live “will help small companies to retire spreadsheet apps and islands of information that are expensive to own and operate when you take into account the labor costs and lost opportunities involved in using those systems,” noted Pombriant.

What Sage Live Might Accomplish

Sage Live is an accounting platform and is “definitely targeting QuickBooks,” Wettemann told CRM Buyer, but many cloud players, such as Intacct, have been around for a long time and have a long history of successful customer upgrades from QuickBooks.

Further, more than 100 accounting and finance applications are on Salesforce AppExchange, “so just being there isn’t enough,” she pointed out. Sage “will have to play by the cloud rules and differentiate what it does in a way that gains it positive ratings to rise above the noise.”

Usability and accessibility win in the cloud. Sage is a traditional ERP provider and “doesn’t have the track record that others have,” Wettemann said.

Cloud SMB applications “are very reference driven,” she noted, so Sage Live “has some catching up to do to change perceptions and make it a viable contender on [companies’] short lists.”

Sage Live may give the company a much-needed boost — Sage CRM continues to trend downward, Nucleus said in its Technology Value Matrix 2H 2015.

Sage’s pricing model might be a problem because SMB customers “are very price sensitive, but they also want flexibility,” Wettemann observed, and “a per-user pricing model for an accounting package, where a company may use a part-time accountant or multiple people may need to access the application for different purposes, may not be the best choice.”