Sage, a global market leader in cloud accounting software, has extended its existing partnership with Microsoft, which will see the integration of cloud solution Sage 50 with Microsoft Office 365.

The announcement came during Sage Summit 2016, the world’s largest gathering of entrepreneurs and business builders in the US city of Chicago.

The new solution also allows customers and the joint ecosystem to grow, extend and innovate on top of the combined solution.   Sage has also become an Office 365 reseller and first-line support provider under the Microsoft Cloud Solutions Provider (CSP) program.

As a CSP partner, Sage will be one of the first global ISVs to bundle Office 365 with their own solution and resell it to small business customers around the world. By integrating Sage 50 with Microsoft Office 365, Sage has enhanced the power of its business solution with greater mobility, analytics and cloud capabilities. Now customers can manage their businesses with Sage 50 and Office 365, across multiple devices and multiple locations—with confidence that their information is live and up to date.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who joined the Sage Summit via a video message, said:”Together, with partners like Sage, we’re focused on empowering professionals to get more out of every moment and for small and medium businesses to grow and seize the opportunities ahead.”

As well as improving productivity and helping customers shift to a mobile first, cloud first world, the Sage 50 and Office 365 solution will allow businesses to:

•    Do businesses anywhere: Track business performance and history, work with customer and supplier records and transactions on the go as they collaborate across all devices. Instantly see available credit position and trading history, see how much money is owed and make important business decisions using information from Sage 50 and Office 365.
•    Make faster, better decisions: Make sense of data quickly, with powerful interactive Microsoft Excel reporting and business performance dashboards.
•    Communicate quickly and easily: Share contacts, schedules, and more without switching between Sage 50 and Office 365.
•    Go Paperless: Store business documents in a secure environment and transactions received electronically. Photos of receipts or invoices can also be stored and accessed along with all records, from Sage, Outlook and OneDrive on your favourite smartphone device.

Speaking live from Sage Summit, Sage CEO Stephen Kelly said: “Working together with Microsoft we are reinventing Sage 50, one of the world’s best-loved business applications. With the rapid growth of the Office 365 user base, the opportunity for future innovation on the Office 365 platform is incredibly exciting. We want to put the power of Sage and Microsoft behind more than 72 million Small & Medium Businesses around the world to liberate them from time-consuming tasks, and super-charge their productivity.”

Sage 50 with Microsoft Office 365 will be available in all Sage 50 countries, starting with the US, Canada, UK and Ireland this winter and extending to other Sage 50 countries through 2017. – TradeArabia News Service