What is Happening?  Saugatuck SVP Bruce Guptill spent this week in Nashville participating in Sage North America’s annual customer and partner Summit. In addition to participating in group sessions with Sage channel and product executives, Guptill took part in numerous sideline discussions with Sage partners, and one-on-one interviews with Sage CEO Pascal Houillon and CTO Himanshu Palsule. Q&A from that interview will be published in a separate, in-depth Strategic Perspective for Saugatuck CRS subscription research clients.

Our net takeaway from this year’s Summit: Like other business software vendors everywhere, Sage is in the middle of a company-deep, Cloud-necessary reinvention. The rapid pace of market change has forced Sage to accept and execute a potentially overwhelming series of significant business and technological challenges, including the following:

On Monday May 14, Sage North America introduced its administrative portal for the Sage Exchange payments platform. Late last week, we were briefed on the portal, the platform, and Sage’s strategy by Greg Hammermaster, President of Sage Payment Solutions.

Here’s Sage’s intro to the announcement: “Accessible through the web and mobile devices, Sage Exchange enables small and midsized businesses (SMBs) to view, manage, and connect their payments environment, and gives SMBs consolidated reporting access to their mobile, point-of-sale (POS), e-commerce, and back office merchant account(s) to help them streamline the back office and manage the payments environment. In the future, Sage Exchange will also provide SMBs with an array of connected services, such as international money transfers and business prepaid cards.” The entire announcement and more info on the platform and portal can be found at http://www.sagepayments.com/ http://www.sagepayments.com/">www.sagepayments.com.