Sage Summit 2014, Day 1

This week in Los Angles, Sage is hosting a North America-wide conversation about the success of small and mid-sized businesses, the challenges they face and how Sage can help them grow and thrive. A number of announcements were released on day 1 of the summit. These include the following:

Sage North America and Moneris Solutions Corporation, Canada’s largest credit and debit card processor, announced a strategic alliance to help Canadian businesses streamline their payment processes, freeing up precious time to focus on what they do best: growing their business. Sage and Moneris will deliver an integrated payment solution that will seamlessly connect Sage accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, such as Sage 50 Accounting–Canadian Edition and Sage 300 ERP, to payment processing technology from Moneris. The new integrated solution will benefit from Moneris’ secure payment solutions, which help merchants minimise direct access to card data.

Sage North America announced continued focus on providing cloud-delivered user experiences to small and medium-sized businesses through close collaboration with Microsoft Corp. This collaboration builds on a number of years of innovation and close ties between the two organisations. Sage has already been working in collaboration with Microsoft to bring innovative solutions to small and medium-sized businesses on a global basis, including Sage 300 Online, Sage 100 Online and Sage Construction and Real Estate Solutions in North America. A key example of the joint innovation that is in development is the interoperation of the Microsoft Cortana personal digital assistant and Sage 100, which was recently spotlighted at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, and will be showcased at Sage Summit. Sage Summit will focus on creating a dialogue for small and medium-sized business owners, to address critical issues like customer acquisition and retention, growing sales and maximizing profit margins.

With the number of Canadian small businesses consistently growing, Sage North America announced key strategic partnerships with several leading Canadian brands as part of its ongoing commitment to support small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in Canada. Sage has engaged two leading female entrepreneur groups in the country: Women in Biz Network and Mompreneur. Sage will be an active contributor to the conversation among these two socially and digitally active networks by providing thought leadership content to their members and being a valuable supporter of this growing group of female entrepreneurs. Sage has also partnered with Canada Post’s VentureOne and MasterCard Canada’s Easy Savings programs, both of which offer small businesses access to a host of solutions to help them grow their business while keeping their costs down. Sage 50 Accounting–Canadian Edition and Sage One Accounting–Canadian Edition are included in the suite of small business accounting solutions available to Canada Post VentureOne™ and MasterCard Canada Easy Savings members.