The first Sage Business Partner conference for African partners in Johannesburg this week places emphasis on the human aspect of integrated accounting, payroll and payment systems, according to Sage CEO Stephen Kelly.

In a keynote address on the opening day of the conference Kelly reaffirmed the company's support for African partners and referenced the goal to serve its 3 million customers more efficiently.

Kelly told his audience of more than a two thousand people that he finds it humbling that more than 50% of businesses in South Africa use Sage VIP payroll to pay their employees. "That is a huge responsibility and we feel that. I just look around at the entrepreneurs in Africa and at the moment we need entrepreneurs more and more...just looking at the African economy projecting growth rates of five percent this year and six percent next year. This is a time for small; business to grow, to export, to take advantage of overseas opportunities through the power of the internet and web sales. This is the time."

Ripe for disruption

The Sage executive bemoaned what he described as a lack of innovation in accounting. He told partners that small businesses deserve the best technology because they contributed the most towards job creation in the economy.

"I think we are ripe for a bit of disruption. If we look at what we do as consumers this is the time and Sage is right at the heart of reinventing accounting, real time accounting...integration between payroll, expenses, income, accounting and payments – in terms of collecting cash. I would challenge us to look at the future. We would argue, in terms of our innovation with our chief technology officer that there is a direct need in our lives as consumers for accounting software, business management solutions and that is so exciting. Could you imagine in the future all our customers running their business from the palm of their hands? This (mobile technology) is our future and we can together invent that future because if we don't, someone else will."

Kelly says Sage has got over two and a half thousand engineers as part of their investment into research and development and their focus is on the cloud, analytics and social among other innovations because they anticipate that a lot of accounting technology has to be mobile first so that people can work on the go.

Feedback from business partners

"Some of the challenges in Africa include the pricing of the software and making it available to more people although there are similar challenges in Brazil and elsewhere," said Ivan Epstein, President for Sage International and Chairman of Sage Foundation.

Epstein and Kelly sought to reassure partners that as Sage innovates and brings in new technology no one would be forced to migrate."We are working on a lot of innovation and we want you to be part of that. A fundamental thing is customers for life, partners for life. We want you to be with us and thank you for making us collectively very successful but that is just a start. I'm sure we have made mistakes in the past, honestly we are not perfect but our integrity in the working with partners is part of our DNA. Our strategy is built on working with partners, building a future and inventing a different world for our collective customers...we want to take partners who have been with us on premier technology in 1988, 1989 and 1990 into a business model of SAS, of cloud, and we think we can do that. We can do it responsibly so you can transition your business model as we transition our business model from premise to what we call hybrid, to exposing data to browsers, to full SAS cloud solutions," detailed Kelly.

He added that the process of transition will be managed in a way that customers who don't want to move to cloud will not be inconvenienced.

Africa partners also raised concerns about the lack of availability of free training courses and lengthy contracts that are riddled with legalese.