Sage Launches the Sage Foundation…What’s Next?

Every day that we wake up Sage is growing in their visibility, branding, and the way they are now approaching business with new CEO Stephen Kelly. With Marc Benioff from Salesforce as a friend/advisor/mentor, Kelly and his team announced the Sage Foundation today with a very generous 2+2+2 giving program that just about mirrors Salesforce’s 1+1+1 program that has been in existence for years.

Under the program Sage will give away 2% of an employee’s time, 2% of free cash flow and 2% of its “smart products” for any charity, social enterprise or non-profit organization. Reading the tea leaves this has an underlying tone to it because today the Salesforce Foundation, with their giving away of Salesforce, has created a community of over 25,000 nonprofit customers. While all Salesforce products are not free most are deeply discounted for these customers.

If you are to look into the future and read all of the messaging about Sage’s new Sage Life product built on the Salesforce 1 Platform for small business it would not be a stretch to have Sage giving away this product or a similar product that it develops for nonprofit organizations. Doing so would provide Sage an instant market of cloud based accounting non-profit customers that could also use the Salesforce engine and Salesforce’s Nonprofit Starter Pack NPSP as an end-to-end solution that could handle the full cycle of not only managing a non-profit organization but handling the finances as well.

The Salesforce NPSP can provide anything from managing volunteers and members to marketing for and collecting donations. In addition, all of the core Salesforce capabilities to run campaigns and drive funding are all at the fingertips of nonprofit customers. The one thing the current solution doesn’t do is handle all of the finances. One can only speculate that this will be a match made in heaven for Sage and Salesforce if it happens.

What remains to be seen is how adaptable a “plug and play” solution will meet the needs of small and medium size businesses or non-profit organizations. If the new Sage Life solution isn’t locked down and can be configured according to a business needs then there will truly be an opportunity. If not, then no need to fear because as a Salesforce Foundation Partner we already have financial systems that work for not for profit customers and can help them with implementing Salesforce and the NPSP and make the appropriate connections between the two systems.

I guess only time will tell but Sage continues to make changes at a blistering pace so I am sure it won’t be long before we see the next piece of news with Salesforce.