Sage Live spotted at London event

Sage, the UK market leader for accounting software, gave visitors to the Business Startup event in London recently the chance to have a sneak preview of its forthcoming Sage Live Cash offering.

"It's our way of addressing a new marketplace and new customers with a whole different offering," said Clive Gray, head of the Sage Live team. "We've taken a business management approach and started from first principles by designing it for someone who's starting a business who doesnt' want to know about the mechanics of accounting."

The Sage Live Cash application is based around an online portal containing a collection of widgets for handling simple business tasks such as raising quotes, issuing invoices, managing cash and dealing with suppliers. Users will be able to move the widgets around the screen to "configure it the way you want", Gray said.

Sage Live will be more than a single application, he explained, but was more a Web 2.0 infrastructure containing forums, chat rooms and a "self-service" knowledge base, Gray said.

The accounting portion is nearly ready for public beta testing, but Sage was still working on the underlying infrastructure to make sure "the whole piece is joined up", Gray said. When the wraps come off in the new year, Sage Live Cash will integrate with Google Docs, PayPal and Sage's own card processing system, ProtX. The application also has BlackBerry interface that will let users carry out a majority many business processes from BlackBerry 8000 and 9000 devices.

Gray refused to confirm quoted monthly prices of £10 per user. "We won't just open the door and put a price on it," he said. "When we go into open beta, everything will be free for a time. Then we will set a price point."

The stance of such a dominant desktop software player has long fascinated analysts who pondered how Sage could maintain its margins and market share as less expensive and more flexible SaaS solutions came to market.

Ironically, Kashflow founder Duane Jackson was one of the most vocal publicists for Sage's new Cloud baby, commenting on UK Business Forums: "The screens on this are very different to Sage 50 as it's designed for a different audience... A 'designed for the web' type application like this is very different to bending 50 to work over the web."

Jackson providing a more detailed description in his personal blog. "If it wasn’t for the Sage name in the top right-corner you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for the work of a cutting-edge Israeli start up."