Public limited company | |
Traded as | : |
Industry | Software |
Founded | 1981 |
Founder |
David Goldman Paul Muller Graham Wylie |
Headquarters | Newcastle upon Tyne, England, United Kingdom |
Number of locations
|
Offices in 24 countries |
Area served
|
Worldwide |
Key people
|
Donald Brydon CBE (Chairman) Stephen Kelly (CEO) |
Products |
Accounting, CRM, Varying according to country, MRP |
Revenue | £1,569.1 million (2016) |
£427.0 million (2016) | |
Profit | £207.6 million (2016) |
Number of employees
|
13,741 (2016) |
Website | www |
The Sage Group plc, commonly known as Sage, is a British multinational enterprise software company headquartered in Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom. It is the world's third-largest supplier of enterprise resource planning software (behind Oracle and SAP), the largest supplier to small businesses, and has 6.1 million customers worldwide. It has offices in 24 countries. The company is the patron of The Sage Gateshead music venue in Gateshead.
Sage is listed on the and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.
The Company was founded by David Goldman, Paul Muller and Graham Wylie in 1981 in Newcastle, to develop estimating and accounting software for small businesses.
A student at Newcastle University, Graham Wylie, took a summer job with an accountancy firm funded by a government small business grant to write software to help their record keeping. This became the basis for Sage Line 50. Next, hired by David Goldman to write some estimating software for his printing company, Campbell Graphics, Graham used the same accounting software to produce the first version of Sage Accounts. David was so impressed that he hired Graham and academic Paul Muller to form Sage, selling their software first to printing companies, and then to a wider market through a network of resellers.
In 1984 the Company launched Sage software, a product for the Amstrad PCW word processor, which used the CP/M operating system. Sage software sales escalated in that year from 30 copies a month to over 300. The Company was first listed on the in 1989.
In 1994 Paul Walker was appointed Chief Executive. In 1998 Sage's Professional Accountants Division was established. In 1999 Sage entered FTSE 100 and launched a dedicated Irish division, based in Dublin as well as its e-business strategy. In that same year the UK acquisition of Tetra saw Sage enter the mid-range business software market.