Key Findings & Highlights:

The Sage Group plc ("Sage"), headquartered in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, U.K. is a provider of enterprise software solutions.

Seeking to automate the accounting and estimating processes of his print business, David Goldman formed Sage in 1981 and began developing accounting software for small businesses.  Through steady adoption of its software and growth, Sage began trading on the London Stock Exchange in 1989.

Sage has continued expanding its portfolio of enterprise software solutions, primarily through development, but also through select strategic acquisitions, particularly in shaping its cloud platform offerings.

The acquisition of Fairsail Limited in March 2017 launched Sage's cloud HCM offering, which it rebranded "Sage People." It was incorporated into its Sage Business Cloud offering when it launched in October 2017.  Sage Business Cloud is Sage's cloud ecosystem portfolio that  provides client companies with technology solutions to support the critical elements of its business encompassing everything from 'money to people'. The focus of this profile is exclusively on the Sage People solution.

Sage's HCM offering, Sage People , is a cloud-based (SaaS) global HR and people management system built on the Salesforce.com cloud platform across a single code base. It provides comprehensive human capital management capabilities across the end-to-end employment landscape. Sage positions its offering as a global cloud HR and people management system.

Sage People does not offer its modules as standalone or independent of each other.  The platform is enabled for mobile, both on apps for iOS and Android and purpose-built with an adaptive design for a consistent UX across various technology and devices (e.g., laptop, mobile, tablet, etc.)

Sage People consists of the following key features:

• HR and people analytics
• People management
• Talent acquisition
• Attendance and leave management
• Compensation, and benefits
• Workforce experience management
• Performance and talent management
• Integration

Sage People is highly flexible in support of clients' unique configuration needs; clients can select key processes to enable (or suppress) and define the level of complexity or simplicity for workflows and functionality, down to the process level. The platform is also capable of supporting custom client branding, messaging, etc.

Sage People provides multinational organizations support for global workforces; currently, the platform has users in 145 countries and supports ~17 languages.

Sage People dedicates ~60% of its resources to platform development, deployment, and support. Exhibit 3 provides a breakdown of its dedicated resources by location.

Sage People leverages select partners for add-on solutions, services, or completing integrations. Additionally, Sage is working toward an open platform and marketplace to provide clients 3rd party apps and services that integrated with Sage People, to complement and extend its capabilities beyond HCM.

Sage People specifically targets multinational mid-market organizations, ideally in the range of 200 to 5k employees. However, its platform can scale up to support clients with more than ~10k. Its smallest client has ~100 employees while its largest has >10k employees.

Sage People currently supports >430 clients and ~300k users in 145+ countries.  The product is currently targeted to businesses in the U.S., U.K. Canada, Australia, and most recently, Germany.