Re: No clouds for customers
"and why Sage would prefer to push hosted solutions with an ongoing charge as well..."
When the article refers to subscriptions and a subscription model here:
"Software subscription rose 29 per cent for the first six months. However, this reflects a move to a subscription model across its portfolio rather than just cloud products, said Roe."
It doesn't just mean hosted solutions: They're moving to a subscription model for traditional desktop software - with the incredible flustercuck potential that has. I asked their Twitter-bod to clarify some points a while back: Specifically, what happens to your data stored in your desktop copy of Sage if you decide to stop using Sage (i.e. paying them for the use of the software) and move to something else.
The answer was basically that you are no longer able to access it. Legally, you need to keep your business records for six years - which kind of necessitates those records being accessible. So before your sub ends, you need to extract all that data, something that most people wouldn't think of doing.
And how do you extract it? Different accounts packages store different information in different ways - so simply exporting the data ready for importing into something else isn't really practical; you'd end up pretty much doing a second time a lot of the accounting work you've already done, in order to recreate the figures as they should be. The only other option is to export every report as a PDF file, covering every key point and period, which would be tedious at best.
A better, and fairer solution would be for the software to become read only, so you can still access that data but can't put anything else in - which Sage could easily do; the mechanism already exists in their software for "archived" data.
IMO Sage's subscription offerings aren't so much "software as a service" but "data as a protection racket".