Sage Partner Summit 2020

Sage Partner Summit

Sage Partner Summit is an annual event bringing together Sage X3, Sage Intacct and Sage People partners from all over the world. Over 1000 attendees enjoyed three days of keynote speeches, product update announcements and networking opportunities with Sage executives and other partners. Ian Bromley, Inixion Managing Director, attended the Summit and has put together a summary of his experience at this event.

Pre Conference Session – ‘Preparing Parts for Success’

This session brought together Sage X3 partners from around the globe to discuss various elements that are involved in the implementation of X3, focusing on successful implementations. The session was delivered by various members of the Sage Centre of Excellence team, which gave partners an insight to, and access to, the ‘brains’ behind the Sage X3 product.

Our MD, Ian Bromley, co-presented one of the sessions which was focused on Performance. The session described various activities that can be carried out to review, tune and improve performance on the system. Ian presented with Bruno Gonzalez from the Sage Centre of Excellence Team.

Inixion engage with the Sage Centre of Excellence where there is a requirement to tune Sage X3 for environments that have high levels of data or specific transactional performance requirements.

Inixion were happy to explain to other global Sage X3 partners that one of the benefits of working with Sage in this way is that is underlines the true partnership between Inixion and Sage, and provides the customer with the comfort that the author of the product is involved in deep technical performance analysis.

Also in the session the partners heard from Sage about the latest developments to the Sage X3 application and platform.

The session also explored how important Credibility, Reliability, Empathy and Transparency are in building Trust in both the pre-sales and customer management process.

Networking

A key reason for the Inixion team to attend the Summit event is the ability to network with the entire Sage and Sage X3 ecosystem, all in one place, all in a few days;  including all parts of Sage from around the world, global partners who are delivering Sage X3 services to their customers in numerous geographies, ISV’s who are providing key add-ons to the Sage X3 solutions, as well as key members of the Sage Senior Management team.

Meetings were held with:

• Members of the Sage Executive Management team, including Steve Hare (Sage CEO), Lee Perkins (Chief Commercial and Product Officer), and Aaron Harris (Global CTO)
• Sabby Gill (Sage UKI Managing Director)
• Robert Sinfield (Vice President Product Sage Business Cloud X3)
• Various ISV partners
• Sage X3 partners from around the globe

Keynote Sessions

Day 1 of Summit kicked off with a packed room of around 500 people.

The underlying message of the conference was ‘Perform at your Best’.

Each day of the Summit started with a Keynote presentation from various members of the Sage team and their strategic partners such as PWC and Amazon.

Steve Hare, Sage CEO, talked about the underlying principles that drive the Sage business. Steve explained that ‘Everything that Sage does is done to provide either Customer Success, Colleague Success, or provide Innovation’.  These are the 3 lenses that Sage look through when developing their strategy for all of their products and provides the backbone to the full digital journey for the Sage Business Cloud suite of products.

Lee Perkins, Chief Commercial and Product Officer, talked about the importance of Partners in the Sage ecosystem and ‘winning together’. He also underlined how Sage X3 is key in Sage’s product strategy for cloud connected applications serving medium segment product centric organisations.

Aaron Harris, Global CTO, explained how Sage X3 serves mid-sized distribution and manufacturing businesses with over 65% of Sage X3 customers being in distribution and manufacturing industries.

Rob Sinfield, Vice President Product Sage Business Cloud X3, provided an overview of the new technologies that are being built in the Sage X3 platform, including:

• GraphQL providing new levels of APIs to enable integration of external applications into X3. This will provide:
  • “A simple to use, secure and highly functional service to build real time synchronous responsive application integrations.“
• An entirely new Development Platform, which enables and support the use of cutting edge technology.

Rob explained that the Sage X3 product is undergoing significant investment to ensure that the platform provides the latest technology which will enable Sage, its partners and their customers to leverage exciting functionality and connectivity in the increasingly digital economy in which we trade in and digital world in which we all live in.

Sage Foundation

Sage Foundation was launched by Sage in 2015 to raise money for and support charities across 23 local markets.   

Sage launched the Sage Foundation for Partners at this year’s Sage Summit. This initiative invites Sage Partners to work alongside Sage in both fundraising for the target of raising $2 million for local charities by 2022, as well as giving back by volunteering. Sage are asking partners to sign up to their ‘Charter for Change’ as a commitment from the owners and senior management of partner businesses to enable their employees to use some of their working time to fundraise and to volunteer on various charitable events.

Inixion is very pleased to announce that it was the first partner globally to sign up to the Charter for Change. Our Managing Director was pleased to receive the Charter, signed by the Inixion Board and by Steve Hare.

Early in the morning on day 2 of the conference, when the sun was just rising in Orlando, 164 of the attendees lined up at the start line of the Sage Foundation 5K Fun Run. Leading the charge was our Managing Director, Ian Bromley. Given that the event was the Sage ‘Partner’ Summit, it was very fitting that Ian celebrated the end of the run with some of the other Sage X3 Partners from the UK. And Ian wore his medal with pride !.

This was Inixion’s first fund raising activity as part of the Sage Foundation, with over £2000 raised for Inixion’s chosen charity, Marlow Opportunity Playgroup, and Inixion’s employee nominated charity, Shooting Star Children’s Hospices.

Digital Transformation

A key message throughout the conference was that Digital Transformation is impacting all of us. Aaron Harris, CTO at Sage, told us about the journey that Sage are on to introduce core digital processes into their applications. It is important to harness this emerging technology to ensure that it is applied in a way that is useful and productive to the end user, bringing about simplification and automation of the daily tasks they carry out.

Key takaway

Coming away from the conference, the underlying message that the Inixion team took away was….