The Sage Partner Summit in Seville was a great chance to bring together Sage Enterprise Management partners, ISV’s and delegates from the Sage community.
It was a very busy and valuable few days, filled with insights into the Sage Enterprise Management (Sage EM) product and opportunities to meet with experts from the partner ecosystem. As a Sage EM focussed Business Partner, we were pleased to see the event return to focus purely on the enterprise level product; with insights on sales, marketing and business development focussed in the enterprise space.
Read on for our key takeaways from the event.
Enterprise Management is Sage’s Biggest Opportunity
It was brilliant to catch up with Jennifer Warawa, EVP at Sage, prior to her keynote and welcome to the event. In her speech she highlighted Sage EM as being the biggest opportunity for Sage and that Sage will now be focussing on enterprise growth. The cloud presents the biggest opportunity with cloud solutions growing at 13% whereas on premise is only growing at 2% per year.
Nick Goode, EVP at Sage, then spoke about their strategy for Sage EM and “winning with the product”. The strategic focus includes connected applications, lightning performance and customer first experiences. We were pleased to see Sage highlighting a customer first approach to the product development as well as launching “Sage Spotlight”, a programme for new customer references.
Meeting and Greeting
The breakout sessions then provided valuable opportunities to meet with our ISV partners as well as learn about new product developments and hone our business skills. We caught up with our partners at Tangerine, as well as Datalinx, Fiscal, Prophix, Mapadoc and V1. It was interesting to see Sage addressing a key partner issue, the difficulty of recruiting in the Sage EM sphere, with the advice being to move focus to psychrometric testing rather than solely skills and experience.
Selling with Noble Purpose
Day 2 kicked off with an inspiring keynote from Lisa Earle McLeod on selling with noble purpose, “sales people selling with noble purpose outperform sales people selling against targets by 350%”. She highlighted the need to focus on how the customer’s life is going to be different by doing business with you, and that the answer to that question should always be your purpose and your story.
We then attended interesting sessions on growing your business through social media, the potential opportunity of e-Commerce in the distribution vertical and what the future of financial planning looks like. Sage also highlighted manufacturing to be a key area of growth, with Sage looking to expand the scope of their manufacturing technologies in order to keep up with the pace of advancements in the industry, such as 3D printing and bots. They will be looking at expanding the functionality of PLM and productions scheduler.
WiFi and Battery Life More Important Than Food and Shelter
The third and final day of the event started with a focus on wider technology trends, that in our lives we are now more reliant on WiFi and battery life than we are food and shelter! Phil Carter, from IDC, then went on to speak about how winning in the new enterprise market would all be about delivering cloud driven digital transformation. Artificial intelligence is an important emerging trend, with it predicted that by 2021 90% of new packaged enterprise applications will have an embedded intelligent decision architecture.
All in all the event showed Sage’s commitment to Sage Enterprise Management as their flagship solution, one that can win in many verticals and one that is being constantly developed to ensure that it is keeping up with the latest technological trends. It was also encouraging to see Sage’s focus on their customers, how customers should always be treated as prospects, as well as their Partners and how important they are in contributing to the success of the Sage ecosystem.
Time for Some Fun…
As with all these events there was, of course, time for some socialising and a bit of a laugh. The Mysoft team certainly made the most of a photo booth at one of the evening events…
Find out more:
- Read why Sage changed the name of Sage X3 to Sage EM
- Discover our latest “Get Fit!” charity initiative
- Find out more about us