Surprise: Sage Group head honcho has left the building

Sage Group chief exec Stephen Kelly has unexpectedly stepped down from his director and CEO roles. Falling asleep in front of computer Boring as she goes at Sage? Oh no, no, no! Shares slide as sales slip below forecasts READ MORE Kelly, who joined on a £790k salary, departs several months after the software company’s half- …

[Anonymous Coward]

Teflon?

He is used to wriggiling out of disasters - he was CFO at Marconi until 2003 when it crashed.

[JMiles]

Re: Teflon?

Really? I didn't know. Next we'll find out that the board who hired him in as CEO are all ex-HP from their successful appointments of Apotheker and/or Fiorina.

[Mayday]

Contracts

"Kelly's year-long notice period kicks in immediately and he's to spend the first nine months on gardening leave"

How do I get one of these? A year notice is a real drag but 9 months (paid) gardening leave? Crikey!

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't cut your way to success....

Worked with Sage over the last few years and seen them cut, cut and cut again re:staff levels, all to keep margins up. Now they've got too few good staff who are too stretched to deliver and as a result an unhappy workforce. There were some really talented folk in the ~30 senior people they most recently culled.

Kelly has found out, that you can't cut your way to success. What they need is more investment in product and people to make it happen. All businesses go in cycles and need to give up some margin to further grow top line.

Really sad to see what's happening there, hopefully a new CEO can restore it's standing and performance.

[MatthewE]

Its a lot more cut throat the markets that they are in. I just their payment solutions however we recently have moved to Stripe as it is much more developer friendly and cheaper.

Their accounting tools also are in an ever increasing market that is becoming ever more cut throat.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was Sage Reseller. Sage has and will probably forever will have very Poor Top Management. Sage Software bought product lines which were (are) incompatible with each other, just too get a large customer base. And failed to bring all the modules up to Business Framework in MAS 90 (Sage 100 etc.).

The Solution is and will be to get Top Management who can make the production lines better, and fix the current issues, then market share will grow, but I think its 10 years too late!