Sage unexectedly announced this week that it was discontinuing development work on its Excel-based management reporting package, Sage 50 Intelligent Reporting. John Stokdyk reports.
AccountingWEB.co.uk member Old Greying Accounting sounded the alert in Any Answers on Wednesday by posting a letter from Sage Accountants Division managing director Greg Ford.
"We've become aware of some compatibility issues between Sage 50 Intelligent Reporting and other software," Ford wrote. "As it's just not practical for us to solve these issues or develop the software further in its current form, we've taken the difficult decision to withdraw Sage 50 Intelligent Reporting from sale from 24 September 2008 and to halt development of the new version of this software."
Other Intelligent Reporting users were stunned by the news, inlcuding CFL, who commented in Any Answers that a Sage salesperson had been offering Sagecover for Intelligent Reporting over the phone two days before the announcement.
Ford put a positive spin on the decision, saying it would allow Sage "to focus our attention on developing core reporting functionality across all the full range of Sage 50 applications".
Sage 50 Intelligent Reporting has become yet another casualty of the company's growth-through-acquisition strategy. Sage bought the original developer IntelligentApps in 2004 and used its business intelligence (BI) technology to create Excel-based reporting for its mid-range and enterprise accounting applications before releasing the Line 50-compatible Intelligent Reporting module in 2006.
With demand for Excel-based reporting tools exploding, AccountingWEB welcomed Intelligent Reporting as "a breakthrough product - but with room for improvements".
As consultant editor David Carter pointed out, Sage Intelligent Reporting made it possible for anyone to interrogate Line 50 data, without having to run the accounting application. Intelligent Reporting took the drudge work out of assembling, validating and formatting accounts data for analysis. While the processing and analytical features powerful and easy to use, the user interface was slightly clunky and important analyses such as sales margin were missing from the first release.
But Sage was not able to capitalise on such promising beginnings. In the intervening years, it embarked on major rewrites of its mid-market products and reorganised and rebranded its families into new product groups (Sage 50, 200 and 1000). Sage's Accountants Division has talked for a long time about bolting Intelligent Reporting into its Practice Solution, but with a major rewrite of its tax programs to accommodate new style tax returns and other technology transitions such as .NET and Windows Vista, it never really got around to it.
Sage's inability to make headway with what seemed like a winning product raises some concern about whether the market is diminishing for Excel-based reporting and business intelligence tools. A year or so ago, this was probably the only section of the financial software market showing much sign of life, which is what stimulated the acquisitions of Hyperion by Oracle, Business Objects by SAP and Cognos by IBM.
All of these deals have failed to produce significant returns yet, according to IntelligentApps founder Paul Martin, who joined Sage when it took over his company. He then left in 2006 to set up an independent outfit, Excel in Business , which now markets the A La Carte business intelligence system. In Martin's view Sage and the other ERP megavendors have not got to grips with the demands of marketing and selling management reporting BI tools.
"I think the days of BI tools are numbered - particularly in the mid-market," said Martin.
"People don't want tools anymore. You can try to give them cubes and tools, but they don't really help. They don't have the time to be trained up to use the products. With A La Carte, we provide ready-formatted management reports out of the box and if there's a format someone wants that we don't have, we'll write it for them for free. People will buy into that, rather than buying BI tools."
