Stephen Kelly has been running Sage Group for only a month, so it is understandable if he is not quite ready to say where he is taking our oldest surviving software company.
Sage had become the IBM of the industry, dull, safe and slow-growing. Three years ago it launched Sage One, a cloud offering. This is selling well, after the odd hiccup — sales are up 150 per cent in the latest financial year, from a low base.
The aim is to satisfy all customers, from well-established businesses run by people who would prefer their software to arrive in tangible form to edgy start-ups happy with the cloud.
One analyst suggested that the company would emerge as a two-track vehicle, the old stuff raising revenues