Me and my 5,000 new friends at #SageSummit at the opening keynote. Selfie on stage. pic.twitter.com/PMWiLRboYK
— Himanshu Palsule (@himanshupalsule) July 29, 2014
Did you miss the Sage Summit keynote this morning? Perhaps you didn’t get the chance to travel to Vegas to attend this year’s Summit, or perhaps you rolled out of your hotel bed late—but for whatever reason, you didn’t see the keynote. You know you can watch the whole recorded keynote on the Sage Summit site…but who has the time for that?! You have work to do! Here’s the super-fast Summit Keynote recap from Tuesday, July 29, 2014.
Pascal Houillon
In his intro, Pascal stressed the importance of having choices in business. He talked about how technology:
- Has made the world more complex
- Causes problems for many businesses
- Has solved many more problems than it has created
- Has made our businesses grow faster and better than they could in the past
“Business people expect choices, not ultimatums.” –Pascal Houillon
Pascal finished his intro by showing off a Sage product video featuring his scuba diving club (who knew?!). The video showcases Sage Exchange, which allows businesses to process multiple payment methods absolutely anywhere. The point of the video is that life shouldn’t be all business; Sage Exchange allows you to do your work everywhere so that you can save time to do what you love.
Himanshu Palsule
Himanshu has some great public speaking skills. He started his speech by reminding us about technology just ten years ago, in 2004. At that time:
- Google had just released their IPO
- We all still rented actual videos from Blockbuster
- When we wanted to listen to music in the car, we put a CD in the CD player
- Facebook had just been invented
Woah.
The important part of Himanshu’s address was that he introduced the way that Sage is making business simpler and faster for everyone, using the Sage Data Cloud, Sage Exchange, Sage Mobile Sales, and Sage Intelligence Go!
Himanshu invited Sage customers up to the stage to talk about their businesses, and staged a “real-time” business transaction, from initial call to completed transaction, using all the above technology, run on the cloud. (If you’re at Sage Summit, and you want to learn more, you should go to the Sage Innovation booth.)
His talk did a good job of showing how much faster business can be accomplished with these products, and the refreshing lack of PowerPoint slides (replaced instead by a nifty and comedic conversation between Pascal and Himanshu) really made this keynote a joy to watch. Oh, and when he walked on stage, he took a selfie with everyone attending. That was pretty nifty. 🙂
Sage Intelligence Go!
Sage Intelligence Go! was especially exciting, as it creates seriously usable business intelligence from not only your data, but from external sources as well. In this section of the talk, we got to see how Sage Intelligence Go! allowed a sample company to compare sales and pricing data to local averages and competitors, using US Census data and competitor pricing data available online. Sage Intelligence Go! will be released in mid-2015 (but Sage Intelligence is already available) and it’s for Sage 100 ERP, Sage 500 ERP, and Sage ERP X3.
Pimm Fox from Bloomberg
Pimm delivered a meandering speech that left me wondering about his point at times, but actually ended up being quite thought-provoking. He talked about the state of the US economy and how it’s much better than we all think it is, and he talked about the general pessimism that we all have about the economy and the future.
“There’s data and there’s information. We hope to tease information out of the data.” –Pimm Fox
Near the end of his speech, he let us in on a little “secret” about the media (he’s been a journalist for 30 years). He said that he media sells fear to people… but that truthfully, we should all do what we think is right for our own [business] futures because no matter what crazy stuff happens in the world, or in the economy, or wherever, the future will always come, and if you plan well, your future will place you right where you need to be.
He’s also broadcasting his Bloomberg radio show, Taking Stock (1 million+ listeners) from Summit tonight, so you should listen.
Whew! Fast recap!
Got any questions that need immediate attention? Watched the keynote and want to chime in? Speak up in the comments below or head over to booth #922 at Summit to ask one of our SWK Tech team members directly.
