Accpac was once a Canadian company. Now, after several decades and countless acquisitions, a Canadian will be running it. That is where Craig Downing finds himself. Accpac International is now under the Sage Software umbrella. The company was one of the Computer Associates divestitures back in 2003. CA sold it to Best Software, which is now Sage.
Originally, Accpac was formed in Richmond, B.C. and was acquired in 1983 by CA.
Born in Toronto, Downing once worked with VAR NewComp Solutions of Mississauga, Ont. He joined CA as an account manager and moved up the corporate ladder. In 2000, he shifted to Accpac as a product manager, and now lives in Plesanton, Calif., Accpac’s HQ.
Downing became the general manager of the Accpac division of Sage a few months ago. He recently sat down with CDN to discuss his new role in the company.
CDN: Was becoming GM of Accpac something you wanted for a long time?
Craig Downing: It was interesting I was very happy doing what I was doing. When Susan Sheridan, who was the GM, took a leave of absence because of medical reasons, I figured my primary role was to support the interim GM.
To be frank, I did not expect them to come to me. Over the past eight months they championed
me for this role. So it did come out of the blue. Nonetheless, it is a great thrill.
CDN: Now that it is official and the company name is Sage, will it be challenging to market Accpac, especially to a customer and reseller base that were loyal to your former brand?
C.D.: We are lucky that Sage is very sensitive to the strength of certain brand names. Accpac is, in so many markets, a strong brand that we can’t afford to lose – mostly in Canada, South Africa, Singapore and Australia. So we were very careful when we rolled out the name changes that we were able to preserve the necessary elements of it. For example, with Accpac Advantage Series, Sage understood they needed to keep the Accpac part. So the product will be known as Sage Accpac. Many people who (were with us) since the 1980s will still be able to refer to the product as Accpac. It will be a bit of an exercise to rollout the Sage name in these markets such as Canada, where we do not have any Sage presence. But we will still have the ability to capitalize on the Accpac name.
CDN: With partners, are you going to try to increase the margins on the Accpac product or will you try to leverage the other product lines from Sage for bigger deals?
C.D.: We are absolutely going to be shopping in our own back yard. We are rolling out Accpac Fixed Assets, which is a Canadian implementation. We have put a little bit of Accpac packaging into it. Being part of Sage gives us access to extend our end-to-end offering in our portfolio and it is a big piece of our strategy moving forward. We are also focusing this year on continuing new market development, while recognizing that the greatest asset we have is our installed base. We have a huge number of customers around the world who are just using our accounting systems. It is time now to allow partners to go back to these customers and talk about Fixed Assets, Human Resources, Warehouse Management, CRM, Point of Sale. What we have found is that the people who are happy with our accounting systems are more than happy to grant us the hour of time it takes to discuss analytics and human resource management. Near the end of this year we will open Sage Select to the partner base. This program is for partners who just sell Sage and not Microsoft or any other products. It will reward them with extra margin (two per cent more) and co-op funds.
CDN: How will you be integrating the new channel programs?
C.D.: The benefits of the new channel initiatives are immediately available to the Accpac partners. And, some of the larger partners are already taking advantage of the programs. We ran some free conference education for principals of the firms on how to manage sales people classes and how to build your business practices. It is about building their businesses. A lot of companies pay lip service to the channel. They give them co-op and an extra point of margin, but Sage does things that are about the big picture and not about getting an extra $20 for each deal. It is about teaching the channel partners to go out and hire a good sales person. We fund head hunter searches and sales people evaluation.
