Sage is about to release their Sage 50 as a hosted package from what I understand the system has not been built up to deliver information over the Internet but that will come in time.
Sage had to move fast to compete against the SaaS upstarts will be interesting how far they will take SaaS through their product line.
Sage's pre-tax profits are up 19 per cent to £113.7m (2005: £95.8m) on sales up 18 per cent to £455.9m (2005: £385.6m). most of this growth has come from acquisitions and have just made another niche purchase with Master Builder, which focuses on the US construction industry for six million dollars.
There has been debate about how Sage balances the books.
"Sage's balance sheet remains a thing of controversy - saved from the ignominy of negative equity only by the company's decision not to amortise goodwill from acquisitions. Goodwill currently stands at £1,275.4m, up from £995.7m in 2005, contributing to shareholders' equity of £957.3m."
Sage plans to buy Visma a Norwegian financial software and services company focusing on the SMB market for £334 million.
Visma turnover last year was £166m with a profit of £22 million
Visma has an install base of 130,000 with 1600 staff supporting their customers Visma specializes in
Finance
Accounting
Logistics
CRM
E-business applications.
They also have a financial services outsourcing division which must be up against stiff competition from the Indian financial services outsourcing giants.
If I had Visma software in my company I would be asking are they going to cut R&D, sell me a roadmap that migrates me on to sage. If you look at the two companies there is near perfect duplication on software functionality both comapnies focus on SME financial software.
Sage has decided they want to be player in the ERP market what with just purchasing USA based Verus Financial Management in January.
Sage is spending most of its research and development budget on guaranteeing future revenue from its existing products rather than inventing new services says David Karlin, managing director for Sage UK's mid-market division another brilliant quote is "You have to stop spending all your R&D time on legacy. Companies can get trapped in that situation, especially if they're in financial problems," and "If that happens, you know you're facing slow but certain death."
Well said David ,full story at zdnet
Sage 1000 is due to be released in May. The new application will be based around the mid-market Line 500 and CRM MME applications with a single database and common interface The vendor said that the software would enable end-users to map processes across their entire business in a single operation. Sage also claimed that this would lead to the retention of customers and a reduction in total cost of ownership.
Sir Julian Horn-Smith will be taking over as Sage chairman starting in August of this year .he comes from Vodafone as deputy chief executive and will bring to the table Vodafone’s experience of growing a global operation with Sage saying they want to take debt from a £100 million to £600 million to spend on acquisitions hopefully he can manage the change.
Interesting article from the times online broker team they are pushing SAGE as a great stock to purchase for a potential takeover.
The reason they have got so excited is Sage has always had the reputation of a minor player within the back office vendor market now that Sage has bought Verus the brokers are hoping the stock will be revalued higher.
Sage must be extremely irritated that they did not get into the Gartner report that said only SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and SSA will be the main players in the ERP Market in a few years time. Sage has indicated that they want to increase their net debt from £100 million to £600 million might need a couple hundred million more to play with the big guys considering Microsoft is spending two billion dollars on R&D alone.
Sage group has bought Verus Financial Management for 184 million pounds
Verus is a merchant services business specialising in credit card and cheque processing for small and medium-sized businesses ('SMEs') based in the US they have 101,000 small and medium-sized merchants in the
US, including speciality retailers, petrol stations, restaurants, property managers and motor dealerships. Verus revenues come from services fees linked to processed sales transactions.
Verus has grown organically by 29% last year a bit of player in their field. Verus services include point of sale transaction processing and customer validity checks. This process includes a validation on each transaction's risk so that individual sales can be queried if appearing unusual. To complete each transaction, Verus transfers cash directly from the card- or cheque-issuing bank to the merchant's bank. The merchant also receives statements and
analysis, which can be used as inputs to accounting software.
This will be a nice extension for sage and they must be keen to sell Sage as a back office replacement to Verus’s customer base.
