HR and finance software specialist Sage has announced a double leadership appointment, with Krish Vitaldevara joining the business as chief product officer (CPO) and Anand Swaminathan as chief strategy officer (CSO).

As CPO, Vitaldevara will oversee the company’s global product and platform strategy, innovation roadmap, and delivery as it continues to develop and grow its range of intelligent AI solutions.

Meanwhile, Swaminathan will work closely with the rest of the executive leadership team to direct corporate strategy, growth priorities, as well as Sage’s long-term value creation agenda.

Vitaldevara will join the executive team on May 18, while Swaminathan will begin on June 15, with both based at the firm’s office in San Jose, California.

“Krish and Anand are proven leaders with deep experience building and scaling world-class products and businesses,” said Sage CEO Steve Hare in an announcement.

“Their appointments reflect our continued investment in innovation and growth, and I’m excited about the impact they’ll have for our customers, colleagues and partners”

A seasoned industry leader, Vitaldevara brings more than 25 years’ experience building and scaling AI-first platforms and products for large enterprises and holds more than 30 patents across distributed systems, trust and safety, as well as anomaly detection.

He joins the business from Salesforce, where he served as general manager and executive vice president following the company’s successful acquisition of Informatica, where he led the integration of products, people, and processes. He has also previously held general manager and senior leadership roles at NetApp, Google, and Microsoft.

Commenting on his new role, Vitaldevara said he joins Sage at an important moment for the business as it looks to further strengthen its market position.

“Sage has a unique purpose, a strong customer focus and culture, and a compelling opportunity to lead in intelligent, trusted solutions for small and medium-sized businesses,” he explained.

“I’m looking forward to working with the team to continue evolving the product portfolio and delivering meaningful impact for customers.”

Swaminathan joins Sage from McKinsey, where he served as a senior partner, advising management teams and boards across industries on AI transformation, technology-enabled growth, and enterprise transformation.

Prior to that, he held senior roles within Accenture Digital, where he helped scale the company’s global operations and supported growth across strategy, data, AI, cloud, and digital product development.

“Sage has a clear strategy and a powerful position in the market,” said Swaminathan.

“I’m thrilled to join the business and to help shape the next phase of growth, building on Sage’s strengths and ensuring we continue to create long-term value for customers, colleagues and shareholders.”

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Sage has added AI-driven insights, automation, and improved connectivity to its Sage 50 accountancy and payroll product in a bid to drive SMB efficiency.

The sixth of the company's products to integrate Sage Copilot, the new version of Sage 50 is now being rolled out to early adopters. Customers will be able to sign in using their Sage account, formerly Sage ID.

The aim is to help small and medium businesses (SMBs) work faster, improve cash flow, and stay protected from cyber threats. Users can now search for reports using natural language prompts and quickly generate cash flow, transaction, and sales summaries.

Purchase transactions can be automated to reduce errors, thanks to AI-powered data extraction and classification that reduces the need for manual data entry and potential mistakes, the company said.

Meanwhile, AI-powered fraud detection, two-factor authentication (2FA), and protection against automated attacks are designed to help businesses stay secure.

"Sage 50 has been the backbone of small business accounting for decades, and these new enhancements ensure it will remain a trusted tool for years to come," said Neal Watkins, EVP of accounting and HR at Sage.

"We know many of our customers rely on it, and we’re committed to making it even better by integrating AI and automation to save them time, reduce manual work, and improve cash flow. It’s safe to say Sage 50 is going from strength to strength and will continue to support SMBs for years to come."

Sage eyes long-term AI gains

Sage has more than two million SMB customers. It has already integrated Copilot into some of its other products, with 40,000 customers in the UK.

Last year, it added AI and machine learning to Intacct, its cloud-based accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, cutting the amount of time spent on accounts payable (AP) data entry.

According to the company’s latest Small Business, Big Opportunity report, 85% of SMBs say that technology is critical to their success, with priorities including security and seamless access to improve efficiency.

"As we grow, we are always looking for ways to work more efficiently and make life a bit easier," said David Harvey, co-founder of Sage customer Seabass Vinyl.

"We’re really excited about what Sage Copilot can do, especially in saving time on the admin that takes us away from bigger priorities. Having those proactive insights will be a huge help as we scale, giving us more headspace to focus on our artists and the business."

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Miskeyed data can be expensive. It accounts for almost £40bn of revenue lost by UK businesses every year, with a further £25bn left on the table through poor data reconciliation or multiple versions of the truth.

Important though it may be, data entry can often feel like a mind-numbing, time-consuming task – and one that's perhaps best done in short bursts. Yet one study from Zapier found that three-quarters of respondents spent up to three hours a day on the job, which is a long time to stay focused on something that can impact the bottom line.

Sage reckons it has the answer: artificial intelligence. It's added AI and machine learning to Intacct, its cloud-based accounting and ERP (enterprise resource planning) solution, to reduce the amount of time spent on AP (accounts payable) data entry. The result should not only be less time spent at the keyboard but fewer mistakes, with AI taking a first pass at the data, for humans to check and post.

We signed up to see how it worked.

Sage Intacct: Submission and recognition

Upload an invoice, and several things happen at once. Most obviously, Intacct extracts the supplier name and address, plus service or product details, dates, and other key data, all of which are necessary to assign items to your accounts. It then applies 'dimensions', similar to metadata for business location, department, project, and the like.

Dimensions are used to draw various metrics into different views, like your register of fixed assets, the general ledger, and reports, so you can filter, sort, and present your data however makes most sense at any given moment.

When it's recognized everything it needs, Intacct compares the captured details against existing transactions to make sure you're not going to repay an invoice that's already been settled, then creates a draft transaction for you to review before posting.

This latter point is important. Sage admits that the system isn't – yet – perfect, but it's improving, and you can expect it to get around 15% smarter over your first month of use. Among early adopters processing between 700 and 900 invoices a month, it's scoring around 90% accuracy.

It's this accuracy that most interested us and, in our tests, in which we worked with both pounds sterling and US dollar invoices – some real, some mocked up – it did a good job of recognizing amounts and the line items to which they related.

Sage Intacct: AI, ML, and your data

Behind the scenes, Sage is using two kinds of data to refine the system. First, it logs the corrections you make and uses these to improve its ongoing interpretation of your own company's accounts. Second, it uses aggregate data to improve broader-brush aspects, such as its ability to recognize different invoice layouts and the way they set out company details, line items, and amounts.

There will be a slight lag in the AI's ongoing improvement, as the machine learning routine kicks in once a day. So, if you made a correction this morning and uploaded a similar invoice this afternoon, you may find it repeats its original mistake. Twenty-four hours later, it should know better.

Beyond Sage, the general concept of AI – and the machine learning that underpins it – has had something of a mixed reception. So should you worry if your account data is used to train a financial AI? We don't believe so. Sage, as the trusted intermediary, is governed by strict privacy laws (not to mention a desire to maintain its good name), the data it holds for UK customers is stored within the European Union, and neither your personal nor your supplier data will ever be shared with other users.

Besides, if you've chosen to use a cloud-based accounting platform anyway, as is now largely the norm, you're already trusting that same data to a third party for safekeeping.

Sage Intacct: Capturing data

The system is built to work with unencrypted PDF, PNG, Jpeg, and Tiff files, of fewer than 200 pages and running to 20MB or less. It's up to you whether you upload invoices directly or email them to a dedicated ingestion address, and automation is optimized for US Dollars. Although other currencies are "usually recorded correctly", per Sage, it will default to US Dollars if it can't work out what's been used.

Depending on how you prefer to work, you might choose to hand out the ingress address to your suppliers so they can submit invoices directly for the system to process. They won't go into your books until you approve the recognition, after all, but you will need to give those suppliers some pointers.

If an invoice needs supporting documentation like receipts to substantiate an expense item, for example, these should be uploaded separately as an attachment. Likewise, although you can manually upload 30 invoices at a time (and you or your suppliers could send 200 as attachments on a single email), they'll each need to be a separate document. If not, they'll appear as a single draft invoice for approval.

Should you decide to hand out your import email address to suppliers, it's therefore essential that they know – and follow – these rules if they're going to be paid on time. If they don't, and Intacct throws up an error, it will send them an email explaining the problem, as it would for any internal user, which they may not receive if they submit invoices from an unmonitored inbox. Ultimately, it's up to you whether you want to head down this route or play the part of intermediary yourself.

When uploading invoices manually, you can choose whether line items are amalgamated or listed separately on a case-by-case basis. And, if you prefer to upload via email, you can set this as a global preference (the default is to enter a single line summarising the invoice total). As the PDF invoice is kept alongside the entry to which it relates, you can still open the original should you need a more in-depth explanation of its contents in the future.

We found that the system generally took a couple of minutes to analyze a single invoice, but your time would probably be better spent submitting several simultaneously and coming back to batch process them when they've all been ingested. Once an invoice has been recognized, you can go in and edit the captured details, often by selecting options like base currency, account, department, and so on, from drop-down menus. The process is form-based and the tax and currency sections are initially collapsed, helping to reduce complexity.

There's plenty of other help along the way. For example, process an invoice from a supplier who doesn't already appear in your records, and you'll be warned that they're unknown – but rather than being forced to manually step out to the suppliers module, you can add them there and then.

Intacct warns that it doesn't currently support Firefox's built-in PDF viewer, and Sage recommends making Adobe Acrobat Reader the default PDF viewer through Firefox's options. However, we conducted our tests using a mix of Firefox and Opera and could see our invoices in both.

Sage Intacct: AP and AI

Sage acquired Intacct in 2017, when demand was shifting from monolithic ERP suites, as part of its plans for 'winning in the cloud'. Intacct itself had launched almost two decades earlier as one of the first cloud-native platforms of its type.

Since the acquisition, Sage has built on the offering and broadened its focus to encompass new markets, including France, South Africa, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Updates come roughly every three months and although most features are common across all territories, a few are market-specific or surface in some territories ahead of others. For a full list of new features and the markets to which they apply, check the published release notes.

So, is AI a good fit for AP? It certainly feels that way. This is a focused implementation with a clear and quantifiable benefit. The fact it's being trained on predictable data, and that Sage can gather that data at scale, means it should quickly get smarter – and even today we were impressed by its ability to recognize items in a variety of invoice layouts and generate draft transactions for approval.

We can see this being a genuine time saver going forward, and one that could help businesses to claw back some of the revenue they may be losing to data entry mistakes.

British businesses have complained that Sage “strong-armed” them into accepting subscription services amid threats that their software packages could be switched off.

Companies with perpetual single-payment software licences told the Financial Times that the firm pushed them into accepting more expensive packages on a monthly subscription model, prompting a wave of complaints.

Perpetual licences purchased by Sage customers are expected to last 15 years, according to the company’s terms and conditions.

However, the firm informed customers that it would switch off access to software by 30 September. Sage justified the decision on ‘security grounds’, and told FT that this would be done to “protect consumer data”.

"A small number of customers will be impacted unless they move to a subscription product as we don’t sell perpetual plans anymore,” the firm added.

The move by Sage meant that some companies rapidly upgraded their subscriptions to avoid the risk of losing access to critical organisational data, and could see many paying more for services in the long run.

Complainants also suggested that the decision to direct them to monthly packages seemed “merely a means to increase the cost” of services. Sage strongly denied the claims.

A spokesperson for the company told IT Pro that the “vast majority” of impacted customers were entitled to an upgrade as part of their Sage Cover contract. This provides customers with free upgrades to the latest version, in addition to product support.

“The remainder of customers, which equates to a small subset, who are using impacted versions of Sage 50 perpetual are off plan, which means they’ve chosen to not have a Sage Cover contract and therefore are not entitled to version upgrades or product support,” the spokesperson said.

“Sage communicated with its customers about this, giving six months’ notice and advised on the action they needed to take and how we could support them.”

Sage's pivoting subscription approach

Denis Torii, VP analyst at Gartner told IT Pro that the decision could be an attempt to better align company practices with market competitors, such as QuickBooks or Xero, for example.

The accountancy software giant has made a concerted shift towards promoting subscription software offerings. A key factor in this move appears to be a determination to improve resilience in the face of challenging market conditions.

And in the long run, monthly software packages represent a more robust, recurring revenue stream compared to one-off long-term licence purchases.

“Are they trying to align themselves with other vendor practices? I think yes", Torii said. "There is a component here of them trying to better align with what others are already doing.

“It’s hard to blame them for trying to do something like this, because again, there might be an honourable reason for that, such as investing resources in solutions and innovation.

“There’s of course a portion of this that could be increasing revenue and positioning themselves better in the market as a company,” Torii added.

Sage told IT Pro that increasing recurring revenues was not the purpose of phasing out the software. The firm added that this was “not material” to the business.

“This was not a revenue opportunity for us, this was about futureproofing customer data, and for the vast majority of customers this resulted in a free upgrade, with no material benefit to us," a spokesperson said.

“What Sage may be doing here is not necessarily something that is exclusive to Sage, and is probably something that we would see others doing,” Torii said.

In recent months, there have been public discussions about SAP potentially increasing maintenance rates. In September, the software giant announced it will “moderately” increase annual support fees by a maximum of 3.3%.

Meanwhile, in July 2022 Oracle confirmed it would increase support prices by around 8% to compensate for inflation and rising costs.

Torii said that it is understandable that small businesses are affected by increased software costs amidst a period of rising costs and inflation.

“For larger organisations, that increase on individual user licences won’t make a big difference, but it’s a different thing for small businesses,” he said.

“I think that message is clear. And one can’t blame customers for being concerned about that, because if you increase a $50 licence on a monthly basis, for example, then at the end of the year you are paying $600 dollars more – which in a low margin business is a heavy impact.”

Since September, shares at Sage have increased by 7%. The firm also reported strong revenue growth in the year to September 2022.

Revenue increased 5% to £1.9 billion, the company announced. This was partly buoyed by impressive growth across cloud products and North American sales, where recurring revenue surged by 14% to £779 million.

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What is business about? Executing a great idea maybe? Or perhaps delivering value to shareholders? Whatever your beliefs, the fact is that no business can run properly without an effective team. And, depending on what kind of business you're running, your team may be the most important physical resource you have.

Building the best team you can, then, is vital to your organisation's livelihood and success. But the job market, from a recruiter's point of view, is becoming increasingly competitive. Figures published in March 2018 by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed that the number of overall job vacancies in the UK between December 2017 and February 2018 stood at 816,000 10,000 more than September to November 2017 and 56,000 more than the same period 12 months before.

Businesses are therefore fighting over a smaller talent pool to try and build their perfect teams. So how can you attract the best talent out there from this diminished stock? And then, once you've attracted the right employees to your business, keep them loyal, engaged and motivated too?

Building a better workplace

Over the past 10 years, what people want and expect from their place of work has changed dramatically.

Thanks to greater mobility with the advent of smartphones and the cloud, increased knowledge of startup and Silicon Valley work culture and perhaps as a reaction to the instability wrought by the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, flexible and agile working have become more desirable to workers.

In a blog post, online recruiter Jobsite listed "the agile workforce" as one of its top trends for this year.

"The fact that organisations like Sky, Google, Facebook and the NHS are among agile working's earliest large-scale adopters says a lot about its potential. Its rapid rise as a software development methodology in the IT sector is also telling, and the value is not lost on candidates," Jobsite says.

Citing research carried out towards the end of 2017, the blog continues: "While 77 percent of recruiters say agile working hasn't significantly affected the hiring process, a massive 86 percent of candidates say they'd consider changing roles if it meant working in an agile environment. And, on average, candidates with an understanding of agile working said they'd give up 16 percent of their salary to make the same switch."

That's not to say wages count for nothing, though, nor is an agile working environment the only way to offer an "extra something" to entice workers to your business and encourage them to stay.

Responding to the ONS' January statistics, which covered the September - November 2017 period, Kevin Green, chief executive of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC), said: "Employers who want an edge over the competition have to design new ways to attract people, like flexible work patterns. Some may need to go to specialist recruiters to get help sourcing talent in areas where there are very few candidates.

"Our data shows employers are increasing starting salaries in a bid to get applicants. However, this isn't translating into broader pay rise for current staff and workers are facing hard times as inflation continues to outstrip pay growth. Employers need to think about salaries and benefits for all of their staff otherwise employees could be tempted by better offers from rival companies."

This raises a key issue: building the best team isn't just about the high-flyers, it's about everyone who works within the business. After all, your organisation isn't just made up of those at the top of the tree, it's a contingent whole. As the Chartered Institute for Professional Development (CIPD) has pointed out, excessive pay and rewards at the executive level can have a negative effect on the rest of the workforce.

Guest stars

When deciding to augment their workforce, businesses don't necessarily have to look to recruit on a permanent basis.

For certain projects, taking on temporary contract workers or freelancers may be the best way to bring in the skills and expertise you need without creating what could be unnecessary permanent positions.

Indeed, according to a March 2018 report by the Association of Independent Professionals and the Self Employed (IPSE), the growth in the number of workers classed as self-employed over the past 10 years has been driven largely by more and more highly-skilled individuals opting to work this way.

This means that, while there is still competition among businesses for this kind of talent, its fluid nature gives organisations a greater chance of finding the right person for the role at the time you need them.

Additionally, contract work can act as a facilitator to finding a standout new team member. If one contractor fits particularly well within the business and did a great job in an area where you're likely to continue investing, there's always the possibility of offering them a permanent role once the project they were brought on to do comes to a close.

Bringing it all together

Underpinning all of this is the need for proper human resource management. No matter what size business you're running, choosing the right software or service is vital to managing remuneration and benefits, keeping track of absences and holidays, or knowing when contracts start and end.

Some of the more advanced platforms out there can also help with recruitment and onboarding, or even collaboration between different sites and locations.

So when you're considering how to build the best team possible for your business, it's worth also looking at the various cloud and on-premise solutions available to make sure your HRM system can keep up with your vision for the future of your company.

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If you want to start a business, first you need a great idea. Once you've got that idea, though, you need to invest and in this technologically advanced age we live in, there's a lot you need to invest in.

Similarly, if you want to grow your business, you're going to need to invest in people and core resources, of course, but also IT.

In the fairly recent past, this would have meant significant capital expenditure in your IT estate and all the services and expertise to go along with that. Even if you were a small or micro-business, you would need at least one server if you wanted to share files and do email. If you had larger aspirations, you would be looking at a server room or data centre.

The truth is, not every business or would-be entrepreneur could afford this level of upfront investment. If you could convince your bank for a business loan, you could start down that road, but you would be saddled with that debt for a long time. If you weren't able to raise those funds, at best growth stalled and at worst businesses died and ideas failed to even get off the ground.

About 10 years ago, however, all that began to change, thanks to the cloud.

The software buffet

For entrepreneurs of all stripes, cloud has removed many of the barriers to entry you can host your own virtual storefront on somebody else's infrastructure for a monthly fee and you probably don't even need a website designer (or not at first, anyway). You can use other cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications to manage sales and customer relationships as well, rather than investing up-front for perpetual license software. Once you're ready to bring onboard other people, you can also opt for cloud-based payroll management and other HR software.

The popularity of SaaS among SMBs is demonstrated by figures gathered by market research firm Techaisle in February 2018. These showed that in the US the number of SMBs using at least one SaaS application increased from 27 percent in 2011 to 73 percent in 2018.

A September 2017 study by the same organisation found that customer-focused cloud services were most important to SMBs, with 76 percent expecting to adopt at least one of these applications during 2018.

The beauty of this software buffet is it allows businesses of all sizes, not just startups or SMBs, to mix-and-match services, selecting what they need in the moment and adding to it as they go along. The subscription nature of the services also means that if a given service doesn't fit the business' needs, they can drop it and go elsewhere, without losing money or falling into contractual issues.

Managed agility

For startups and small businesses, which face slim margins and greater vulnerability to market forces, the benefits of the flexibility offered by the SaaS model are fairly obvious. But larger businesses all the way up to the very largest enterprises, in fact can also benefit from it in the form of increased agility.

In a 2017 report called Cloud Strategy and Leadership, analyst house Gartner recommended: "As part of the cloud strategy, CIOs need to educate their CEOs and boards of directors about the need to invest in cloud as a style of computing that drives greater speed, agility and innovation."

Large businesses and their CIOs are no stranger to the cloud, though. It was in some of these organisations where cloud first started to take off, albeit in the form of "shadow IT", with the likes of Salesforce and Box making a name for themselves as companies that could deliver what the rank-and-file of an organisation needed faster and with less friction than their own IT departments.

Over time, such services have been legitimised as they have proven their value through greater productivity and ROI versus traditional software assuming there even was a perpetual license equivalent of the service in question. Indeed, although productivity software for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations existed previously, the collaboration elements of cloud-based platforms like G Suite and Office 365 are completely novel. And it's these types of features that can enhance agility, creativity and flexibility within a business and with external parties like partners and customers.

But the role of the CIO remains crucial when it comes to adopting cloud services, especially for agility.

As Gartner research vice president and distinguished analyst Janelle Hill pointed out in the same 2017 report: "Independent and uncoordinated journeys into cloud SaaS mean the goals, selection approach, initiation and ongoing implementation of services will be fragmented at best and siloed at worst."

"A coordinated, value-optimised approach has the advantage of enabling multiple business units to benefit from joint decisions and shared end-user support for all of the various SaaS solutions," she added.

Future trends

When it comes to running an agile business in the future, there are dozens of new trends gaining popularity that make use of the power of the cloud, with notable ones including DevOps and low-code/no-code (LCNC).

For these types of more technical trends, cloud is essential as it increases the speed of development and can also enable developers to offer a self-service catalogue of apps and code hosted on a cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform (IaaS). The flexible scale-up, scale-down consumption model of IaaS is also a benefit to DevOps teams, and their more traditional development counterparts, for trialling and testing new initiatives without anyone having to commit hundreds-of-thousands of pounds to building out new on-premise infrastructure.

This isn't to say that on-premise IT is dead, though. As Gartner noted in spring 2017, the move among established, larger businesses is towards hybrid IT, which offers a more flexible solution to their needs. Indeed, the analysts predicted that by 2020 90 percent of all organisations will have adopted hybrid infrastructure management capabilities.

In short, cloud has levelled the playing field for organisations of all sizes, increasing opportunities for creativity, agility and innovation, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

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There's one problem that virtually every company is guaranteed to run into over the course of its lifetime, and it's one that can have serious knock-on implications for a business' future if not addressed early on. The problem is, how do you maintain your company's culture and values as you transition from a startup to a scale-up and beyond?

The importance of maintaining a good corporate culture can't be overstated; it's one of the main ways you can attract and retain talent, and neglecting it can result in reputational damage. In 2017, the tech industry was faced with a cautionary tale in the form of Uber. Of all the numerous scandals, gaffes and mishaps that befell the company over the course of the year, the vast majority could be traced back to issues with its culture and values.

If you want to avoid following the same path, it's essential to ensure that your guiding principles don't fall by the wayside when the money starts rolling in. One of the best ways to do that is by firmly establishing a mission statement and a code of conduct early on in your company's life.

The right ethos

A mission statement is essential for any business, but don't fill it with nebulous, vaguely-worded pledges - get specific. Setting out detailed and focused guidelines provides a touchstone that you can continually refer back to to ensure you haven't lost your way.

Maintaining a strong culture relies on collaboration and co-operation with everyone in the business playing their role, according to LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. "If your only culture is top-down hierarchy and messaging and communications that comes from the top, that culture won't survive as you really balloon the organisation," he said. "Instead, you want a horizontal accountability. You want it so that everybody is keeping everyone else accountable to the culture that we're in." (Source)

He points to Netflix boss Reed Hastings' culture deck', a series of slides that detail exactly what Netflix's culture and values are.

Another crucial point to make regarding the transition from startup to scale-up is that you shouldn't mistake aesthetic for culture. If your only commitment to maintaining your startup values is a couple of ping-pong tables and some bean bags, it's going to be painfully obvious.

In fact, your working space should be the least important thing about your corporate culture. Instead, the foundation of your organisation should be the people within it. Staffing and recruitment are, naturally, very important when scaling a company, and you should welcome the ideas and fresh perspectives your new blood brings in - these keep a company agile and innovative.

"The most important thing isn't how shiny and full their CV is," Carl Reader, author of The Start Up Coach, says, "it's in whether their attitude is going to fit in with - and hopefully enhance - your company culture.

"Without a team that's on the same page as you, the coherent, growth-minded culture you have so carefully developed as a startup will simply dissolve."

As Hoffman points out, however, your hiring will need to change as your company scales, and you'll have to step back and trust your colleagues to hire well, something that will require you to systematise.

Cain Ullah, CEO of digital consultancy Red Badger, shares these views, saying: "As you scale you need to work out how to scale excellence throughout your company from culture to skills.

"It starts with alignment. To scale you need to be able to let go, empower others and give them autonomy to excel at what they do best."

But Hoffman advises that keeping a small role in it can be an excellent way to maintain control over the culture, ensuring that potential new hires are a good fit.

People problems

Unfortunately, expansion can also cause senior leadership to lose touch with the staff at the coalface. As the number of employees increases, the amount of time you can spend getting to know individual teams and staff members decreases, but you should make an effort not to lose touch with the trenches. Town halls and all-hands meetings are great, but as a company scales, it becomes harder and harder to get a true sense of your staff's opinions and values.

Tim Stone, COO for European IoT investor Breed Reply, says introducing more structured meetings, more sophisticated communication plans, CRM tools and clear roles and responsibilities for people can help keep that entrepreneurial spirit as your business grows.

Take time to meet with staff in smaller settings, and instruct all levels of leadership to do the same. Not only will this make employees feel like valued members of the team who can make positive contributions, but management can also keep its finger on the pulse of employee sentiment even as headcounts balloon.

David Levine, CEO of home interiors startup DigitalBridge, found success with a similar tactic. "To ensure that everyone continues to have a voice as we grow, we implemented regular company-wide vision and feedback sessions," he says.

"These meetings are driven by an ethos of creative friction', in which everybody is actively encouraged to put forward their own ways of working, perspectives and experiences. We can all offer something different, and the key to collaborative growth lies in embracing everybody's unique perspectives."

Y Combinator founder Sam Altman points out that it's worth taking the time to consider the place of early employees within a rapidly-growing company, to stop them leaving as their roles see them work less closely with the top brass.

"It's people that have gone from being absolutely on the inside to not, that leads to a huge amount of turnover," he says, "and I think it's worth thinking proactively if someone is special enough that I'm going to somehow include them in the executive team."

One tactic highlighted by Altman is that of Airbnb founder Brian Chesky, who spends around two-thirds of his nights taking early Airbnb staffers to dinner, talking about the state of the company, what issues they're facing and other subjects, which can help them still feel connected, even if they're not at the upper executive level.

The role of the cloud

Technology can also be an excellent way to stay connected. Cloud collaboration tools have obvious advantages in terms of connecting individuals and teams who are separated by distance, but they can also help foster a positive culture within your organisation. Using collaboration tools for discussing non-work topics can create a sense of community between employees outside of work, and ensuring that executives are both active and approachable on these platforms stops barriers forming between staff and management.

Adopting new ways of working, and tech that supports it, can mitigate some of the speed and responsiveness a larger company inevitably loses, too. Working agile in other ways, such as by using DevOps methodologies, as well as adopting cloud-based infrastructure and SaaS applications that unite and provide greater transparency across key functions such as finance, HR and marketing, helps.

Some chaos - both internal and external - is an unavoidable side-effect of rapid scaling though, Altman notes, and it's important that your business is flexible enough to cope with it. " You know, people that run these perfectly non-chaotic organisations somehow never build great companies," he says. "The trade-off is we're going to accept a little bit of chaos in exchange for a shot at one of these massive, great companies, and founders just have to sell that to their teams. It's hard."

However, while all this rapid change is going on, companies need to make sure that they're being careful with their money. Change can be good, but change for its own sake - particularly when accompanied by financial investment - can lead to companies burning through their cash reserves too quickly. Look at your existing resources and work out where you actually need to make investments, and where your existing operations will suffice.

Ultimately, culture is one of the trickiest things for any business to get right, but it's also one of the most vital. A strong culture can carry a company through countless rough patches, but a weak culture can undermine a seemingly-successful business from within. The key is to establish a good culture early on in your company's life, and to keep it front-of-mind as you grow.

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The startup scene has become one of today's most exciting and fluid industries to be a part of. The constant stream of innovative and disruptive ideas coming from east London, Manchester and Bristol - to name a just a few cities full of entrepreneurs - has transformed the way modern business is conducted, and there is scarcely an industry that hasn't been revolutionised in some way by an upstart with a small team and a big idea.

There's plenty that established enterprises can learn from what startups are doing, so let's look at exactly what makes the next big thing' the next big thing.

A unique idea is an easy sell

Despite Uber's chequered history, its success proves that a unique idea sells. Many startups today are almost guaranteed to succeed - at least initially - purely because the idea they have is so strong. While the concept of ride-hailing existed previously, Uber married it with an easy-to-use smartphone app, producing a multi-billion dollar product.

Make it cheaper and simpler

Some startups aren't able to rely on a unique idea - instead they focus on creating something that's more marketable. The virtual and augmented reality industries were near non-existent a few years ago, yet today the likes of Microsoft, HTC, Sony and Samsung are all competing for control of a highly lucrative market. Instead of joining that fight, startup firm Mira has created an AR kit that's cheap enough for the mass market, and simple enough to use with your smartphone, earning itself a place on many lists as a firm to watch.

Attract investment by attracting talent

A sure way to generate interest in a new idea is to showcase the talent that's behind it. Startups such as self-driving car company Aurora, or analyst firm Periscope Data, may be categorised as new companies', but in reality their teams are a collection of former talent from some of the world's largest companies, including Google, Box, Microsoft, Tesla and Uber.

It's this careful selection of minds, brought together to achieve something brand new and innovative, that excites investors - and it forms a significant part of their sales pitch.

Be savvy about social media

Attracting investors to an idea is one thing, but building a loyal customer base is something else entirely. A great deal of startups to watch in 2018 aren't necessarily doing anything particularly disruptive, nor do they have entirely unique ideas. What makes them stand out is their superb ability to speak the language of their audience.

The most backed project ever on Kickstarter remains a fairly simple card game known as Exploding Kittens' that managed to raise nearly $9 million across more than 200,000 backers. Aside from a sensational name, the game's creators, which include former Xbox chief design officer Elan Lee, produced a superb marketing campaign, creating animations and videos that could be easily shared on social media, targeted at those who wanted something that was easy to play, but risque enough to be hit among groups of friends.

It also appeared around the same time as the similarly successful Cards Against Humanity series, and was able to capitalise on customer appetite for the genre.

Refine your idea for the target audience

You don't need to have a mass audience to be a disruptive force in the startup industry.

In fact, some of the most exciting projects in 2018 are those that are highly specialised. One to watch this year is Shippo, a startup that aims to provide small to medium-sized businesses with Amazon-like shipping capabilities. It's a partnership borne out of necessity, as many businesses have suffered as a result of Amazon's Prime next day delivery service, which offers unrivalled convenience to customers.

Shippo's platform allows customers to compare routes, times, and prices from private delivery companies, such as FedEx and UPS, and has even developed an API that can be integrated into a business's network. It's an example of a startup accurately identifying a precise problem, and working with the rest of the industry for the benefit of its customers.

Be imaginative with funding

No matter the company, and regardless of how great an idea is, every startup needs two things: funding and a guiding hand. One of the reasons why innovative British banking startup Revolut made many lists of companies to look out for was not only down to its superb product, but because of its diverse funding portfolio.

Revolut's launch was bolstered by an initial $10 million investment as part of its association with European investment firm Seedcamp, later achieving a further $66 million in series B funding. Yet it also allowed customers to participate in its series A funding round, putting 1 million in equity up for grabs. Perhaps even more important than the money it generated was the buzz this created among potential customers.

Being quirky in a saturated market

It's very easy for startups to drown in oversaturated markets. With so many new companies entering the field at once, you're almost guaranteed to find more than one provider offering similar solutions to a single problem.

To thrive, startups need to stand out. For example, there are a number of startups within the cosmetics industry that alternative products to those offered in stores, yet Function of Beauty is a company allowing customers to create bespoke shampoos and conditioners based on the type of hair they have. Customers also receive their creations in personalised bottles, meaning each product is entirely unique. It's this incredible attention to detail that has made it a startup success worth over $110 million today.

Be receptive to feedback

The startup industry can be as unforgiving as it is lucrative - there's far greater pressure on companies getting products right early on than in traditional enterprise, and if something goes wrong, it's near impossible to recover.

Successful startups therefore listen to their customers very carefully, and in some instances, invite them to participate in the design process. Airbnb, one of the industry's biggest success stories, was able to triple its user base by simply hosting an afternoon session with early backers to listen to feedback on its platform. It's a proactive style of customer interaction that investors admire, rather than asking for feedback once a product breaks.

Get creative with your business operations

A major advantage of brand new, relatively small companies is that you can be inventive with the way your business operates. Zapier, a workflow automation startup, is highly unusual in that it's never established a company headquarters and its workforce operates entirely remotely. Not only does this mean it's able to hire people easily from anywhere in the world, it also has none of the overhead costs of a traditional business.

Last year the company made an even bolder move by setting aside a $10,000 "de-location" package in order to incentivise employees to move away from the incredibly expensive Silicon Valley area.

Respond quickly to market trends

Perhaps the biggest edge startups have over traditional businesses is their ability to respond quickly to new market demands. In fact, the unprecedented growth of recent technology trends such as AI and the internet of things has been underpinned by the work of startups.

For example, Chicago-based IoT firm Uptake, which reached its $2 billion valuation faster than any other startup, is able to gather and analyse data from connected machinery and sensors. This means that traditional companies can take advantage of improved efficiency of smart hardware, without having to hire the expertise needed to interpret data.

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Scaling your business can be a tricky proposition for any startup. But once you reach a certain size, it can be easy to lose sight of your roots and forget the elements that made your company so dynamic when it was small.

There are many lessons that large enterprises can take from startups, which you can use to ensure your company is still agile and innovative even when it's home to hundreds or even thousands of employees.

Lead by example

One of the most common shared attributes of successful tech firms that have gone from being small startups to major industry players is that they're almost always helmed by a strong leadership team. Box, for example, is still headed up by its four co-founders, Aaron Levie, Sam Ghods, Dylan Smith and Jeff Queisser. Ghods and Queisser are focused more on the site's architecture and technical development, as opposed to Levie and Smith's C-level roles, but all four still have an active an integral role in the company.

Similarly, Dell Technologies is still led by original founder and namesake Michael Dell. Aside from a brief three-year period between 2004 and 2007, Dell has led the company for its entire lifetime. In both cases, the companies have benefited from the founders' clear vision and deep commitment to the long-term well-being of the business.

It's not just the person at the top, though; successful startups also benefit from an executive team with a wide variety of backgrounds, skills and specialisations. This is easy when you're a startup - the nature of startups is that they're generally fairly diverse. When your company starts making money, however, you may find your board comprised of an increasing number of carbon copy individuals.

Aside from being undesirable from an equality standpoint, this replication also means that your board won't bring the maximum potential experience to bear on problems. If you look at the companies who have successfully transitioned from startup to global powerhouse, they almost universally have board members with backgrounds in engineering, finance, planning, operations and more.

A strong leadership team also lessens the risk that the company will be subject to the whims of investors and other market forces, influences which can drive a company's strategy away from long-term growth in favour of short-term profits and stability. One of the hallmarks of a startup is its willingness to take risks and explore untested waters, but when a company matures, this adventurous spirit is often abandoned as businesses prioritise safer tactics.

It's important to remember, however, that increased risks can lead to vastly increased rewards. Google is an excellent example in this regard; the company has continually proven its commitment to invest in innovation, and fund the development not only of risky plays in its own market, but also wild moonshots into totally untested markets like self-driving vehicles.

Innovation can be risky, certainly - but Google provides an excellent blueprint for how to leverage the resources, talent and capital of a large enterprise to maintain the cutting-edge mindset that it had when it was still a startup. According to Dan White, CEO of insurance-focused digital transformation consultancy Ninety, adopting the concept of innovation labs' can help big companies recapture some of that startup magic.

"Some of these are failing, but those that are helping the whole employee base learn to innovate, and giving them a platform on which to do so, are succeeding in embedding startup practices and values in their day-to-day operations," White says.

The same sentiment is echoed by Tim Stone, the COO of European IoT investor Breed Reply. "As well as the founder, successful businesses have many internal entrepreneurs," he says. "Evangelists for new ideas that need to be empowered and not stifled by process. For bigger firms, allowing innovation and ownership of ideas outside their responsibilities, which startups do more naturally, is vital."

Failure can be a good thing

One of the inevitable consequences of innovation is failure. No company will have a 100 percent success rate when it comes to new projects and ideas, and some of the products and initiatives you attempt will be disasters. The important thing is not to be put off by those failures. Apple is the best proof of this; despite being one of the biggest tech companies on the face of the planet and arguably the gold standard in hardware design, the history of Steve Jobs' company is littered with bloopers.

Take the Apple III, for instance - a famously poorly-designed product which overheated so badly that chips would actually melt out of their sockets. Then there was Apple's ill-fated games console, the Pippin, which had a $559 price tag and sold a measly 40,000 units. Neither of these failures (or the many, many others) succeeded in denting Apple's passion for innovation, and Jobs' dedication paid off when the iMac, iPhone, iPod and iPad all became the pinnacles of their fields. Incidentally, it's worth noting that Apple is another company whose success is thanks in no small part to the work of a talented and visionary leader.

Carl Reader, author of The Start Up Coach, is a big proponent for allowing businesses to make mistakes. "As with any corporate culture, embracing failure positively has to come from the top and become part of the fabric of the organisation," he says.

"The leader has to not only give permission for their teams to fail, but also admit failures of their own, and demonstrate how the learnings from any failure have been used."

It's no big surprise that tech companies aren't shy about making use of the latest and greatest software tools in order to maximise their efficiency and productivity, but it's nevertheless an example that all large enterprises can learn from. Startups are great at jumping on new, innovative tools and processes as soon as they're available, which can pay dividends in terms of output.

Remember to think small as well as big

Larger businesses, on the other hand, can often fall foul of the sunk cost fallacy'. This particular logical error means that the more you've invested in a particular thing - in terms of either time or money - the more unwilling you are to abandon it and move on. It's the thing that convinces your brain that because you've put so much into it, leaving it behind would be a waste.

This fallacy frequently leads large businesses to stick with complex, unwieldy legacy IT tools, simply because they've spent so much money on them. In actual fact, however, moving to newer cloud-based SaaS tools can actually end up saving your business money. Not only are they often cheaper in the long run than the cost of maintaining legacy systems, the man-hours that can be saved with more intuitive and fully-featured tools add up quickly. According to a 2017 Forrester Research survey, cost reduction was a top factor for over half of organisations that are currently in the process of migrating to the cloud.

"Of course, stay true to your business and your clients," advises Reader. "But don't get stuck in the this is how we do it' mindset. A common word in the startup lexicon is pivot' in other words, look at what isn't working or isn't serving your business best, and adjust accordingly. Listen to what your staff and clients are telling you. Inaccuracies and inefficiencies all impact the customer experience negatively, so take advantage of feedback, new ideas and advancing technology to improve your service and systems."

Thinking like a startup also necessitates a change in which metrics you use to judge success, White says. "One way of driving startup behaviour within large corporates is to emulate some of the things that startups measure. For instance, a real focus on what are called traction metrics'. These are a form of leading indicator', i.e. a metric that tells you what the future might contain, rather than what the past achieved. Examples of these are user sign-up rates, engagement time, attrition rates, et cetera."

By taking these elements into consideration and tactically borrowing from the startup playbook, larger companies can re-integrate the energy and passion of a startup back into their business, which can fuel future growth and innovation. Becoming a large enterprise doesn't mean that you need to become boring, predictable and risk-averse. Remember, when it comes to your company, it's not the size the counts; it's how you use it.

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It's never been easier to fund a good idea, but choosing the best route for your business can be a minefield.

Two decades ago, the choices were simple but limited: you'd need a bank, benefactor or redundancy cheque. These routes are still possible, of course, but they're poorly suited to unconventional startups. Bold ideas from ambitious entrepreneurs need agile funding to match.

Modern, non-traditional sources of finance let today's founders think big from day one, building the kind of cashflow that businesses of yore had to build over a period of many years.

Less interested in past performance, the investors that today's startups attract buy into the stories behind them, many of which promise to build a happier, healthier, better-connected world.

Traditional, non-traditional and personal funding explained

Traditional, non-traditional and personal funding have fundamental differences, many of which relate to the level of risk to the startup, as much as they do to the source of the finance itself.

• Traditional funding, like a bank loan, often requires that businesses have a proven track record, which is rarely an option for a startup. Alternatively, the founders may be asked to use their home as collateral. This makes truly revolutionary ideas or anything facing established competition, such as Mycroft's Alexa rival, too risky to get off the ground.
• Personal funding, like cashing in a pension or spending your life savings, may be too great a sacrifice for the first-time entrepreneur. Family and friends will often pressure them not to gamble their life's achievement against an uncertain reward.
• Non-traditional funding, like peer-to-peer lending, accelerators and business competitions, spread the risk across multiple micro-investors, or call on venture capitalists that can easily sustain a loss. They free the entrepreneur to focus on developing their idea, rather than chasing further funding or worrying that they're about to be out on the street.

It's this latter category we'll be looking at here, with five non-traditional sources of funding all flexible startups must consider.

The different types of crowdfunding

Kickstarter is often credited with inventing the concept of crowdfunding, but that particular accolade goes to Marillion, after the band raised 43,000 through donations in 1997 to fund its US tour.

Since then, we've seen the rise of Indiegogo, Unbound and Patreon, which have developed a framework for entrepreneurs, authors and ambitious online creators.

Oculus Rift and the Pebble watch were both crowdfunding successes. Positive News, a magazine that majors on constructive journalism, crowdfunded its transition from a newspaper to a magazine in 2015. It's now a co-op, owned by 1,500 micro-investors in 33 countries, each of whom can influence its direction.

But crowdfunding isn't for everyone. Marillion and Positive News each had a following; you'll be starting from scratch. Oculus Rift and Pebble were standout products. Is yours?

Successful campaigns need thought-through ideas, achievable milestones and crucially a plan for delivering tangible products or services. Your investors are your first customers, after all.

If your idea is conceptual, a slow burner, or promises to grow your supporters' investment rather than send them hardware, books or music, you'll have more luck with a dedicated business-funding platform. Crowdcube (which financed the Sugru mouldable glue) and Seedrs (which helped Tossed expand) let you pitch to a different kind of investor one who is less interested in your product than your business fundamentals.

Accelerators vs incubators

If you crowdfund your venture, you're largely on your own. You'll be free to run things however you choose, but might end up spending capital on support. Consider an accelerator instead or even an incubator and that support will be built in.

"An incubator is more about the physical space," says Nesta's head of new technology and startup research, Chris Haley. "Accelerators major on advice and support, with a cohort of ten or 20 companies coming together for a fixed period typically six months to benefit from peer learning."

Accelerators are often funded by businesses who want to get in on the ground floor by investing in ventures that will later deliver a profit.

Nesta has identified more than 200 incubators and 160 accelerators, which support around 7,000 UK businesses with 33 million of annual investment.

Seedcamp, the UK's longest-established accelerator, appears in the Nesta list and has invested in 250 ventures. It typically exchanges 100,000 plus the time it spends advising the founders and introducing them to its network of advisors for 7.5% of the startup's equity. Sia Houchangnia, a Seedcamp investment partner, describes the figures as "pretty standard in the industry there's not much of a question of modelling to understand if it's the right price".

It's this equity swap that distinguishes accelerators from incubators, the latter of which offer advice and support in exchange for rent and fees. By necessity, incubators invest close to home, while more than half of the UK's accelerators are in London.

Pitching to an accelerator isn't easy, but there are ways to increase your appeal. "Having a strong team in place, with an edge and an ability to address the problems you're going after, is crucial," Houchangnia says. "You might not have all the resources you need, but if you understand your market and have executed on similar products, that's important. We're looking for companies with global ambition."

"Accelerators and incubators typically take on companies at about the same stage," says Haley. "It's wrong to think that accelerators are always super-early-stage investors and incubators later ones. Some will be, but some accelerators do want you to have proved yourself."

Accelerators and incubators typically take on companies at about the same stage. It's wrong to think accelerators are always super-early-stage investors and incubators later ones

Houchangnia agrees. For Seedcamp, the right time to invest is determined by several factors and it's not always day one.

"If you're technical, going after a well-defined problem like early stroke diagnosis, we'd be comfortable investing years before your first commercial contract. If the technology has less of an edge but the team has operational expertise, we might want to see proof of demand for the product. In some other cases, we might be looking at companies that already have early revenue."

Accelerators won't usually sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) as they need to discuss your idea with their partners but, says Haley, it's rare to come across a rogue operator.

Haley advises talking to potential cohorts and previous applicants, as well as the accelerator's own team. Most accelerators trumpet their successes on their websites which in Seedcamp's case includes 161 operational companies, of which two are now valued in excess of 1 billion.

Business competitions

Failure to engage an accelerator may suggest you need to rethink your idea or that you need a more specialist route of finance.

Funding competitions, sponsored by big business, accept applications from startups in the same or a complementary field.

Shell Springboard is open to applications from low-carbon businesses, and awards a single 150,000 grant per year, plus five additional grants of 40,000. When we say grant, that's exactly what we mean: Shell doesn't take equity in the winning businesses. The money is backed by business-development feedback from low-carbon advocates.

It's just one of dozens that open for limited periods every year. Innovate UK which itself offers between 25,000 and 10 million for innovative products, processes and services maintains a list of available funding opportunities and advice on applying for both funding and loans online.

Peer-to-peer lending

If your venture doesn't align with an existing competition, your product isn't suited to crowdfunding and you can't attract an accelerator, is the bank your only option?

Not necessarily. Peer-to-peer lending could be the answer.

You may findpeer loan providers, like Funding Circle, to be more flexible than your local bank. They'll still need to see a viable business plan and proof you can repay the loan, but by spreading the risk among hundreds or even thousands of individual investors, they're often willing to take a punt where a single financial institution may not.

Your level of risk is naturally reflected in their rates, but for a good prospect with viable plans to repay the investment, they start at less than 3%. This is broadly the same as a high-street bank.

Beyond banking as usual

However you choose to finance your venture, the initial cash injection will likely mark the point where your idea becomes a viable startup. Where you go from here is up to you and your investors.

You may well discover that sourcing your capital was actually the easy bit. Check out how fintech can help you grow your business, and the one money mistake that all bad businesses make and how you can make sure you don't fall victim.

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What's the one money mistake every failing business makes? It's not setting the wrong price or paying its staff too little: it's a failure to understand the various types of debt and debits passing through its books from day one.

When you're starting out, getting a fix on your accounts is no small task. Well-funded startups hire full-time accountants, but that's rarely an option for the 5.4 million British businesses employing fewer than nine staff. For them, choosing appropriate software is the best way to go.

But where do you start?

A profit or loss analysis

Few companies last long if they're not turning a profit, but that's not the whole story. To work out whether your business is viable, you need to separate your fixed and variable costs, the latter of which have a greater impact on your chance of success.

Variable costs, which include postage, tax and manufacturing, increase with every sale. Subtract them from your sale price, then divide your fixed costs by the result to discover how many sales it will take to turn your first profit.

A business with fixed costs (rent, utilities and wages) of 52,500, selling 8.99 books that cost 4.82 to print and post, would need to ship 12,590 copies to break even:

52,500 / (8.99 - 4.82) = 12,590

If the market won't support those sales, the business will need to re-price, cut costs or find a new venture. No amount of playing with its accounts will change that.

"We can only support a business in doing business," says Chris Wade, VP of product for accountancy software firm Sage. "If a company makes poor choices about what it wants to do or how to go to market, the best solution in the world can't support them."

This is where the likes of Sage Accounting and Sage Financials software comes in. These programs are designed to help the business spot where the pain points lie, and identify whether they really are problems at all.

Speculate to accumulate

Tesla lost more than $4,000 on every car it sold a couple of years ago, but with $4 billion cash on hand, it could keep the production line running. How has it done since then? At first glance, not well. Despite selling just over 100,000 units in 2017, its latest SEC filing showed that its revenues of $11.8 billion delivered a net loss of $2.2 billion.

Divide that by the number of cars it's sold, and the losses appear to have widened to $22,000 apiece. So if things aren't improving, why hasn't Musk shut Tesla down to focus on flamethrowers full-time?

The answer is that Tesla is about more than just cars, and if you only look at the headline figures you won't see the whole picture. These figures include one-time costs, such as air-freighting hardware to Jamestown, South Australia, to build Tesla's 100MW battery array. The array will feed money back into the company over the longer term, financing its ongoing research and vehicle production.

It's easy to forget that Tesla, founded in 2003, is still a relative startup beside Ford (1903) and Mercedes-Benz (1926), making this the perfect example of a company taking early losses for the sake of longer-term success.

Sales are only for show

It's tempting to follow Tesla's lead, keeping prices comparatively low in the hope of generating buzz but this is a dangerous game. Paper-thin profits don't leave room for error and don't build in contingency. Growing your sales feels good, but unless you're doing it for the right reasons, the figures alone are meaningless.

IBM's second president, Thomas Watson, is often misquoted as saying there was a global market for "about five computers". He was actually talking about the 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine, rather than computers in general, but the point remains that even on so few sales (it actually took orders for 18), it still made sense for IBM to invest in research and production.

There's no magic bullet for formulating a sales plan, choosing the right price and attracting customers and although software can help you monitor what's happening in your business, it has to be used alongside your business sense.

"Having a system in place gives you that intrinsic visibility into the underlying performance, so you know where the money has gone, where it's coming from, who your customers are and who owes you money," says Wade. "All of that means you're no longer relying on the most unreliable thing: the human brain."

Profiting from proof

If you've cut your costs as far as you can, and can't sustain losses for as long as Tesla, what next? Raising additional capital is one option, but it's only open to businesses that can prove they can pay it back.

Tracking your accounts from day one in software that was designed for the job gives you an overview of your business performance and lets you project into the future. Both are crucial when pitching for additional funding and deciding how to spend it.

"You can make better decisions more quickly," says Wade. "We hear about access to capital being a limiting factor to small businesses, but it's much easier to secure funding if you've got a system that helps a financier understand the health of your business at the push of a button."

Having this information to hand, in Wade's words, "lets the owner worry about doing business, rather than managing a business".

The one money mistake all failing businesses make

If all failing businesses have one thing in common, it's not necessarily that they're spending more than they're making. As we said at the outset, it's a failure to understand the implications of the various debts and debits that pass through its books. If they don't have the tools they need to identify that imbalance and understand what it means it can quickly become an issue.

"It might not be the most fundamental mistake that an entrepreneur makes, but failing to prepare for a future where they need to know these things is preparing to fail for that future," says Wade. "Systems give a business longevity and the confidence it needs to take things forward."

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If you've recently ordered a takeaway, picked up a beer or had your DNA sequenced, you may have encountered one of the UK's "unicorn" companies.

Unicorns are a rare breed of company, hence the playful moniker, billed as startups that have eclipsed a valuation of $1 billion (around 720 million). They're companies making the impossible seem possible, acting as disruptors in their fields.

The term unicorn is not clearly defined, so there is a bit of contention over its use. Some argue publicly listed companies shouldn't count, while others say companies that have moved to the UK from abroad should be excluded.

As a result, top-level estimates suggest Europe has more than 50 unicorns; others suggest slightly less, with around 22 of these behemoth firms originating or being based in the UK up from 18 in 2016. In fact, more than a third of European founders are said to be based on our fair isle.

Deliveroo

One particular success story is Deliveroo. Founded in 2013 by Americans Will Shu and Greg Orlowski in London, it became a unicorn last year. From just five employees, its office now spans 50,000 square feet and its employees number almost 2,000.

The technology behind Deliveroo has allowed the company to grow at a rapid pace, reaching a valuation of more than $2 billion (around 1.4 billion) in just half a decade. Justin Landsberger, the company's UK and Ireland commercial director, highlights the prominence of the iPhone in the early days as being "super important" in allowing the company to grow.

"When we first began, we were operational in one postcode in West London," he says. "Fast-forward five years and we're now in over 200 cities, we're creating one of Europe's biggest tech hubs, and we've created work for 30,000 riders."

Just Eat

Deliveroo isn't the only unicorn in the food industry. Valued at around $7.7 billion (5.5 billion) in November last year, Just Eat is worth half a billion pounds more than the UK's second-largest supermarket, Sainsbury's.

It revolutionised takeaway food by letting people easily order online, and in 2017 it reported 21.5 million customers and 172.4 million orders worldwide worth around $4.6 billion (3.3 billion), an increase of 26% on the year before.

First launched by five entrepreneurs in Denmark in 2001, the company moved its headquarters to London in 2008 and now employs almost 3,000 people. Last year it entered the FTSE 100 for the first time.

Improbable

It's not all about food, either. Elsewhere on the unicorn list you'll find Improbable, a virtual-simulation startup co-founded in 2012 by three graduates. In 2017, Improbable raised $502 million (around 360 million) in a round of funding led by Japan's SoftBank Group, the largest ever round of venture funding for a private British company. This earned it a valuation of more than $1 billion.

The company is using this money to develop its main product, an operating system called SpatialOS. It's designed to allow the creation of massive simulated worlds, some the size of entire countries, earning comparisons to The Matrix. The team is hoping to release a game based around this OS, called Worlds Adrift, in the near future.

Oxford Nanopore Technologies

Launched out of the University of Oxford by a handful of people in 2005, Oxford Nanopore Technologies now has more than 350 employees and is revolutionising the market of DNA sequencing with its low-cost and easy-to-use devices. Worth an estimated $1.7 billion (1.25 billion), its lofty goal is to "enable the analysis of any living thing, by any person, in any environment".

DNA sequencing involves reading strands of DNA that can be used by doctors and researchers to diagnose diseases, see how organisms evolve, and more. Oxford Nanopore is shaking up the industry with its inexpensive products, such as the pocket-sized MinION priced at $1,000, compared to its competitors priced in the millions.

BrewDog

BrewDog was founded as a brewery in Fraserburgh, Scotland in 2007 by James Watt and Martin Dickie. Struggling after the first year, the duo hit the jackpot when it won all of the top four places at a bottled beer competition organised by Tesco.

The company set out to make a more exciting beer for pub-goers, and it has certainly done that. From humble beginnings, the company is now worth $1.4 billion (1 billion), thanks in no small part to its striking branding that separates it from the crowd.

BenevolentAI

In London you'll find BenevolentAI, a biotech business founded in 2013 to disrupt the pharmaceutical industry. It uses artificial intelligence to mine research papers to find new compounds or molecules for medical uses.

The approach has been hugely successful. It is now the biggest private artificial-intelligence company in Europe, valued at more than $1.8 billion (1.3 billion), with 19 active drug research programmes. Later this year it will conduct its first clinical trial, another major stepping stone for the company.

Skyscanner

Beginning in 2003 in Scotland as an Excel spreadsheet, Skyscanner now welcomes 60 million monthly visitors to its site every month. It's one of the most recognisable flight-comparison websites in the world.

The site is now available in more than 30 languages, offering users an easy way to compare prices from all commercial flights. In 2016, Skyscanner was sold to China's Ctrip for $1.7 billion (around 1.4 billion), meaning it is no longer a unicorn in the strictest sense although it certainly has been a major disruptor.

The UK's next unicorns

A number of companies has already been tipped to join the exclusive club of UK unicorns. One is London startup TrueLayer, an open-banking platform fintech firm. Another is Cardiff-based tech company Amplyfi, a prospective Welsh unicorn thanks to its artificial-intelligence platform that supports strategic decision-making.

The digital bank Monzo is rapidly making waves, being valued at about $336 million (280 million) in November 2017, while Perkbox hopes to make the jump by offering employers new ways to provide incentives to their employees. And Performance Horizon, which provides real-time insight on data analytics, is being billed as the first future unicorn in the North East.

How to become a unicorn: Tips from the top

So with a number of successes and rising stars, what's the key to unicorn success in the UK?

"It's a clich, but most founders make hundreds of mistakes," David Buttress, the former CEO and co-founder of Just Eat, tells Alphr. "The important thing is to move on quickly. Good entrepreneurs are honest and not afraid to take risks.

"I can't think of any successful founders who've started off by saying I want to build a unicorn'. You need to grasp hold of something more meaningful, that you truly care about, otherwise no-one else will want to be a part of it."

Justin Landsberger, meanwhile, says simplicity has been the key to Deliveroo's success. "We've always done the same thing since day one," he says. "We never deviated from our initial plan, and such a singular focus allowed us to truly focus on what we were about."

Skyscanner CEO Gareth Williams says it's important to maintain an uplifting environment. "As companies grow, they can bloat [and] become inward-facing, political and static.

"That doesn't need to be the case, though, and I believe that with the right policies and the right people, you can maintain a rewarding, fun and positive workplace."

Getting there will be no mean feat. But if the companies mentioned here are anything to go by, there's plenty of opportunity for success. No matter how big you get, though, it's important never to forget where you started.

"Will [Shu] still makes deliveries, and I don't think he'll be stopping any time soon," says Landsberger.

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You've developed your idea, secured funding and finally launched your startup. Now you need to triage your venture and consider which tools will help you grow beyond a rented desk.

Chief among them will be how you process, track and chase payments. This used to mean a weekly trip to the bank, but now fintech the technology of storing and moving money has knocked digital finance into second gear, and left the traditional players looking unwieldy and out of date.

Fintech in the cloud

"The cloud is fundamental to the changing economic model," according to Chris Wade, VP of product for UK accounting software firm Sage. "It makes success more attainable to more businesses and gives them the freedom to try something at relatively low cost. If it doesn't work for them, they can change."

Sage has been transitioning its products from local apps to cloud-based ones for some time. Requiring no capital outlay or investment in hardware and training, Wade believes this shift removes the imperative to persevere with a platform that doesn't suit or grow with your business.

"The cloud lets you make better choices about which technology works for your business. The whole collaborative, remote working experience applies in both management and delivery now, so if you've got a solution designed with that in mind, it'll support you in ways a desktop [application] with an embedded workflow won't."

But accounting in the cloud does more than track your expenses. APIs open your books to a new generation of fintech tools, bringing to startups the kind of facilities that were once the preserve of the minted multinational.

Disruptors like Stripe integrate with Xero and other accounting apps so that solo and micro-businesses can now accept card payments. Yodlee is bridging the gap between banks and their customers, downloading business transactions and streaming them into cloud-enabled bookkeeping tools. FreeAgent will even reconcile the results subject to your approval based on the invoices you've sent, bills you've received, and what it's learnt about how you run your business.

"These flows would historically have been on paper," says Wade, "but no cloud is an island now, and no element of the workflow has to be solved exclusively by one vendor. That means you can make decisions based on what your bank account contains, not what your mistyped accounts suggest."

Banking across borders

Sooner or later, a growing business will need to consider foreign exchange. Whether you're buying supplies from China or selling goods to Europe, you'll quickly discover the cost of doing business through a regular bank.

Why? "[While] the world is now very global, the financial system hasn't caught up," says Stuart Gregory, head of business for TransferWise. "It's still pinned down to single countries with old, clunky ways of doing things. I don't think that meets anyone's expectations of what an online banking service should be."

TransferWise saw this as an opportunity. With funding from an accelerator, it set up a cross-border transfer service, charging low fees and using standard inter-bank rates for every transaction. Seven years on, TransferWise now offers a borderless business bank account that simultaneously holds 28 currencies. With native IBAN codes for the UK, US, Europe and Australia, it lets customers pay in and out as though they were locals in 60 different countries.

"We've been focused on solving a specific customer problem, rather than seeing it as an opportunity for margin, which is perhaps where a lot of banks [have been focused]," Gregory continues. "Everyone travels, phones and works across Europe. This is a wake-up call. Banks need to respond to changes in the market and changes in expectations."

Regulated by the FCA on a licence that covers the whole of Europe, TransferWise is moving more than $2 billion a month and, at 15%, its share of the UK market for cross-border transfers is closing fast on the largest traditional banks.

Its offering lacks some of the features you'd expect of a regular bank account, such as direct debits and a debit card, but these gaps are plugged elsewhere. Revolut, which handles both international and crypto currencies, offers personal and business borderless accounts linked to prepaid cards. Monzo goes further, with debit cards and direct debits, but as it offers only one account type, it may appeal more to the freelancer or sole trader.

Do I need an office?

If you're happy with virtual banking, you probably don't need an office, either.

Slack, Trello, VoIP and web apps mean there's little you can't do remotely even if you have colleagues. Hire a distributed workforce and you're free to choose the best person for each job, regardless of where they live. They'll be easier to recruit if they don't need to relocate, and you might save on salaries, attracting higher-calibre candidates who are happy to offset potential earnings against the freedom of working from home.

You can still have a central number on your email footer, though. Answering services such as Lincolnshire-based Miss Moneypenny will pick up a virtual number using your company name and redirect enquiries to whoever is most appropriate. On the rare occasion you need to host team meetings, office-rental services such as Regus lease space for an hour at a time.

Scaling your IT investment

Reducing your capital outlay at the start lets you redirect your limited funds into marketing and hiring staff, so leasing hardware rather than buying makes immediate sense. You'll preserve as much of your startup capital as you can, and in doing so, sustain your operation through the lean early months.

Birmingham-based Geex offers a standard three-year business hardware leasing option, at the end of which businesses can either buy the leased equipment, or upgrade. It also offers shorter-term leases but, says director Steve Khela, "anything less than two years and the numbers don't really add up".

Leases are typically only available to credit-worthy businesses, but Geex will loan to startups if the directors sign personal guarantees. With the era of quantitative easing at an end, and central banks increasing rates to counter inflation, leasing will lock in potential savings, as the repayments won't go up in sync with the base rate. There are tax benefits, too, as the repayment can be offset against corporation tax.

Smarter money management is vital in the launch phase of any new venture, whether it's through leasing, or leveraging fintech to reduce your exposure to fees and commission. While your ambition may be unlimited, your funds aren't, and every penny held back as well as each minute saved through automation will help your business along the road to becoming a fully fledged enterprise.

Sooner or later, a growing business will need to consider foreign exchange. Whether you're buying supplies from China or selling goods to Europe, you'll quickly discover the cost of doing business through a regular bank.

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Can you imagine a world without email? Without Facebook or Twitter? Indeed, a world bereft of the connectivity to apps and services we rely on as business users and consumers?

A world without the internet seems not just unthinkable, but impossible and unworkable. Until recently, cloud computing was not given the same status by many.

But change is coming. By 2020, a corporate no cloud' policy will be as rare as a no internet' policy, according to analyst firm Gartner.

"Aside from the fact that many organisations with a no-cloud policy actually have some under-the-radar or unavoidable cloud usage, we believe that this position will become increasingly untenable," said Gartner's research vice president Jeffrey Mann.

"Cloud will increasingly be the default option for software deployment. The same is true for custom software, which increasingly is designed for some variation of public or private cloud."

Organisations that fail to realise the opportunities that cloud opens up and the barriers to entry, expansion and accelerated innovation in brings down, will be left behind.

An evolution

Cloud computing itself has moved on from something requiring demystification to a topic that is largely defined and discussed by outcomes rather than explanations. Individual business users want to know how to do their job more effectively and efficiently often more with less whilst delivering business value and proving their worth. While departmental heads and the higher echelons of business and IT decision makers want to help the organisation sell more, boost customer satisfaction, reduce churn and overheads and, ultimately, digitally transform so they remain fit for the future. The big question is how can they do all of this whilst keeping the lights on? The simple answer is cloud.

There are general benefits that any organisation adopting cloud-based services can expect to enjoy. These include but are not limited to:

• Move from CapEx to OpEx, enabling greater predictability of spend
• Only pay for what you need or will consumer rather than conservative and prohibitive IT predictive budgeting
• Greater agility
• A development model than enables you to fail-fast, move on but, hopefully, a greater chance of success too
• Flexibility
• Enhanced efficiency and productivity
• Increased transparency
• Accessibility and the ability to do anything, anywhere
• Disaster-recovery
• Baked in security
• Latest version always-on
• Better decision-making

Ultimately, though, the success of any organistion will be measured in two core ways: by reputation and financial health. Reputation can be greatly protected and enhanced by the speed and agility cloud offers, while finances can be affected positively by a move to cloud as well as managed much more effectively.

Financial management is one area that is increasingly being viewed with a cloud-focused lens. And with good reason as there are more granular benefits to be explored.

Financial folklore

For many reasons, whether regulatory, compliance, finance's paper-based legacy or something else, accounts departments across the board have not been seen as leading the charge when it comes to innovating, change or adopting new technology.

By the end of this decade, more than a third (36 percent) of enterprises plan to make use of cloud to support their transactional systems of record, according to a Gartner survey of senior finance executives carried out in 2017.

Interestingly, the study of more than 400 global financial decision makers, found that there was particularly high year-on-year grown when it came to using cloud for financial business applications.

The wider cloud industry has also recognised the valid and varied role cloud can play in transforming financial services, with the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) setting up a dedicated special interest group (SIG) for this very reason in 2017.

"This is an incredibly exciting time for the financial services market - technology is being deployed to overturn previous norms, to bring new products and services to market, and to create a more sophisticated and seamless way of operating," said Ray Bricknell, who heads up the new CIF SIG as chairman.

Bricknell, currently managing director of Behind Every Cloud, and previously CTO at $8bn-listed hedge fund RAB Capital as well as holding roles at Barclays and Prudential among others, added: "Cloud computing offers a more agile and scalable IT infrastructure, providing the fundamentals for this kind of digital transformation. While financial services have generally been relatively slow to embrace this change, it is now accepted wisdom that the majority of commodity IT functions can be procured more cost effectively, reliably, and securely from CSPs."

Wider recognition

Small and mid-size organisations have also woken up to the idea of cloud-first or cloud-only with Gartner's study finding that 44.6 percent, 37.7 percent and 40.4 percent of small, medium and large enterprises were planning to adopt cloud over the next three years.

"We have found that most clients asking about these financial business application markets are solely interested in the cloud option," said John Van Decker, another of Gartner's research vice presidents.

"Many enterprises that currently run on-premises solutions want to move to newer solutions that put more control in the hands of the end user, and reduce the effort required when compared with on-premises upgrades."

Van Decker referred to cloud as a game changer for financial management business applications, adding that most platforms had now been re-architected in the cloud offering not just more predictable and sustainable revenue for vendors, but less strain on organisational IT support, which in turn frees up resources to add more value elsewhere.

Financial firms, rather than just finance departments, are also leaning towards cloud-based systems and services. Research firm IDC predicts that worldwide spending on industry cloud by these firms will increase by 24 percent in 2018. By 2021, total worldwide spending in this area is expected to hit $7.2 billion.

"Dozens of new industry collaborative clouds are emerging each year, helping to foster digital transformation, streamline industry value chains, and ultimately drive innovation, while most software vendors are also shifting their portfolios to focus more heavily on designing industry cloud solutions. Healthcare continues to lead the charge from a vertical standpoint, but many industries have picked up momentum, including manufacturing, financial services, and even government," said Eric Newmark, program vice president of industry cloud research at IDC.

"Though the market's tipping point is still a few years away, IDC believes the industry cloud market represents one of the largest vertical growth opportunities for technology vendors and professional services firms through 2025."

Cloud in action

ThinScale Technology is a case in point of the benefits that can be realised by moving financial elements of a business to the cloud.

"Technology moves so quickly, especially in the cloud space. Our systems and processes needed to be moving at the same pace," said Patricia McNeela, head of operations and finance at ThinScale Technology.

Brendan Kiely, the firm's co-founder and managing director, added: "Having a 360 view of your business is absolutely critical now... It gives us a canvas, upon which we can see our business."

Just some of the finance-specific benefits this company and others can expect include:

• An real-time view of what's happening
• Financial - and overall transparency for all key stakeholders
• One view of the truth/easily accessible and digestible dashboards
• The ability to make better-informed decisions based on accurate and real-time data
• Anytime/anywhere access on any device
• Customisation of reports in addition to templates for ease of information sharing

Ultimately, weighing up cloud vs on-premise pros and cons is the same, as with any implementation justification you'll need to make. And, like any investment, something that should be done once all parts of the equation have been taken into account. There is a wide array of services and solutions out there, many of which are modular so you can build on a foundation once you're familiar with the platform and what it can do/has to offer.

Now you've heard about what cloud has to offer financial decision makers and businesses generally, why not find out more about Sage Business Cloud Financials? It offers real-time, anywhere, anytime access and can be personalised so it's suited to your specific role.

On the day that the Supreme Court upheld Parliament's right to vote on implementing Article 50, techUK also outlined its priorities for the UK government's Brexit negotiations.

The technology industry trade body, which represents around 850 large and small tech companies, called for a "realistic and robust plan" post-Brexit that protects digital sectors of the UK economy.

In particular, it called for a smooth transition from exiting the single market to establish a free trade agreement with the EU, as well as continued access to international skills.

It listed the priorities shortly after this morning's Supreme Court vote, which emerged 8-3 in favour of preventing Theresa May's government from invoking Article 50 without an Act of Parliament.

Pinsent Masons warned the ruling would cause uncertainty for businesses. "Now that approval is needed in both the Commons and the Lords a major constitutional debate will be triggered. This casts doubt over the reality of the March timetable being met if the debate ping pongs between both Houses," Guy Lougher, head of Pinsent Masons' Brexit advisory group, said.

"In the meantime, businesses should prepare for the range of potential risks and opportunities that Brexit could bring, whilst avoiding premature decisions should Article 50 be invoked some time down the line."

TechUK warned that Britain's tech businesses are some of its biggest exporters, and thus vulnerable to a hard Brexit that cuts off the UK's access to skills and the single market.

Citing research it commissioned from economic consultancy Frontier Economics, based largely on ONS data, techUK said the technology sector contributes 24% of the UK's total exports and three million jobs.

Jacqueline de Rojas, techUK president and UK & Ireland MD of Sage, said: "There is no sector more dynamic, more innovative, more resilient than tech, but that doesn't make it immune to Brexit."

TechUK CEO Julian David added: "The government needs to be realistic about the impact of Brexit on the UK's digital sectors. It is manageable but it needs to be managed. A disorderly Brexit would be highly disruptive."

In its priorities for May's Brexit negotiations, techUK called on the government to recognise the "strategic importance" of digital businesses and stressed such organisations need to be able to plan ahead to make investment decisions.

The government should also work with the industry to understand what it needs from a free trade agreement, with about half of tech exports landing in EU countries, according to the body.

CEO David said: "These businesses are highly dependent upon the single market - they need regulatory continuity and negotiated access in key areas. A bespoke free trade agreement is the best vehicle for that. But there will need to be a comprehensive transitional deal. A full free trade agreement will take several years to implement."

The government's negotiators should also come up with a "credible plan" for the UK to retain access to foreign workers, tech UK said, with 18% of its three million workers being born outside the UK.

TechUK and Frontier Economics' report found that 45% of employment growth in digital sectors came through foreign-born workers from 2009 to 2015.

Lastly, techUK called for a robust legal framework for data transfers outside of the UK, with the EU-US Privacy Shield agreement no longer applying to Britain upon Brexit taking effect.

"This needs to be achieved before the UK leaves the European Union to ensure that businesses have a robust legal basis on which to transfer personal data between the UK and the EU from the day that the UK leaves the EU," the body said.

Sage CEO Stephen Kelly has blasted global financial leaders for not caring enough about small businesses.

Speaking at Sage Summit 2016 in Chicago, Kelly told 15000 of Sage's customers: "Watch the news. It's all big business. Look at global financial summits like Davos hundreds of privileged old men jumping on private jets to glamorous resorts where they pontificate and nothing changes. And where are you guys? Shut out.

"Not on the agenda, not on the ski slopes back home running your business, working flat out. The issues holding our customers back about are pretty much the same around the world. It's about red tape, bureaucracy, stupid legislation, outdated taxes, finding the right talent and skills. And the fuel of growth, cash flow," he continued.

"We don't need outdated global gatherings of big business lobby groups and policy makers. We need real reform on these issues that hold you back and burden your business. We want to use our voice to get you that reform."

Earlier this year Kelly accepted an invitation from former Prime Minister, David Cameron, to act as his business ambassador on the proviso that he could also act as a representative of SMBs.

In the US, the exec said Sage had taken the temperature of entrepreneurs "and found that over half of you are dissatisfied with the current political landscape. You used words like disgusted. Discouraged. Disappointed."

He said the company will be calling presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton to account to help small businesses, as well as running a series of event in the US to help businesses understand what both the Democrats and Republicans will do for Sage's customers.

Sage CEO Stephen Kelly said: "We are working on making concepts like the IoT, machine learning, blockchain and data sciences into a reality for businesses, accountants and partners. This is way more than cloud and mobile-first. It's designing and building technologies that truly power businesses, freeing entrepreneurs to grow and win."

One new offering highlighted during the company's annual user conference, Sage Summit 2016, was a new admin bot, Pegg, a smart assistant that allows users to track expenses via their chosen messaging app.

Sage claims that by digitising information at the point of capture, it takes away the pain from receipts and expenses, eradicating the need for paper and data entry.

In addition, Sage has partnered with Slack, which will act as one of the core messaging channels connected to Pegg. "With the rise of freelancing and the sharing economy, the number of small businesses is growing exponentially. Most of these business owners use messaging apps, and with Pegg we aim to bridge the gap between these apps and work,rendering accounting invisible to the end user and making running a business as simple as sending a text," said Sage's global director for mobile product management, Kriti Sharma.

Announced with a demonstration live on stage, the accounting industry's first bot, Pegg is available now in Beta.

Meanwhile, Sage's new EVP of product marketing, Jennifer Warawa, demonstrated the integration of its real-time accounting solution, Sage Live, and TomTom Telematics. The new software integration allows businesses with fleets of vehicles to record mileage and automate expense reports. As Sage Live runs on the Salesforce platform it can use existing integrations with third parties such as TomTom WEBFLEET. Via the fleet management, service journey data is automatically available in Sage Live.

Finally, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella joined via video to announce the coming together of Microsoft Office 365 and Sage 50 making Sage the first ever software company to partner with the platform.

Sage has also become an Office 365 reseller and first-line support provider under the Microsoft Cloud Solutions Provider (CSP) programme. As a CSP partner, Sage will be one of the first global ISVs to bundle Office 365 with their own solution and resell it to SMBs globally.

Sage provides a range of business software for thousands of firms in the UK, including Specsavers, Lloyds TSB and the MarussiaF1 team.

IT Pro caught up with Stuart Lynn, the company's CIO, to discuss all manner of things ranging from the consumerisation of IT and BYOD policies as well as the importance of infrastructure and Windows 8's role in business.

As a CIO, what are your thoughts on the growing trend of BYOD? Is this something you actively encourage at Sage?

It is important for employees to use devices that they are comfortable with.

BYOD is a trend that is coming over from the US where businesses have a different mindset they want employees to pay for their own equipment.

If someone needed a mobile device for work, I'd rather buy them one. However, we don't stop employees from using their own devices for work purposes.

What sort of devices do you deploy at Sage? Do you have a preference for a particular platform?

I've got 2,500 people in the UK and Ireland. Some have multiple devices such as mobiles, desktops and laptops. We've been replacing desktops with laptops to help facilitate mobile working.

In terms of platforms, there is a big push on Apple devices in the workplace such as iPads. Today, I would prefer employees to have an Apple device because we can manage it centrally.

The team building the entry level SaaS products use Macs because programs such as Ruby on Rails work better. Our graphic design people use Apple products too. More sales people are starting to use Apple laptops, as there is a big attraction to devices such as the MacBook Air.

We've got a few Android users and Windows Phone devices being used, but the majority are using Blackberrys and Apple devices.

I'm a fan of Apple products. I've got an iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and a 27in iMac and people ask me whether it affects my judgment when it comes to deployment. The answer is no.

I'm happy with giving users a choice as to which device they use, as I don't think enforcement is the right way to go. It is important for employees to use devices that they are comfortable with as this will only increase productivity.

With the push towards using mobile devices, wireless connectivity is more important than ever. Can you tell us how you manage Wi-Fi use?

We've got 1200 people on site in Newcastle and there used to be enormous pressure on the Wi-Fi network.

We've had to spend many tens of thousands of pounds on a Wi-Fi infrastructure to ensure it allows users to connect, [as well as investing in] device security and management.

You can't just give out a Wi-Fi key to one person as it goes viral so we have security tokens and compartmentalise the Wi-Fi.

From an infrastructure perspective, what is your main concern?

Resilience. We support thousands of businesses in the UK. We have 400 telecoms support staff and if they can't access data then they can't help customers. Similarly our sales staff wouldn't be able to sell products.

To avoid problems, we run two datacentres in Newcastle. The two datacentres are mirrored, so I can lose a whole datacentre and the other will fill in. If we lose power, we've got a generator on the roof. We've also got everything backup every 10 minutes to a disaster recovery site as a contingency. So the maximum we'd ever loose is 10 minutes of data.

With Windows 8 on the horizon, can you share some of your thoughts about the operating system? Do you plan on upgrading early on?

We're up to date with Windows because we build software for customers, so we have to test it out on the latest platforms.

We're tracking Windows 8 and the development team is already building apps for it. I've played around with the Metro interface and I'm not sure about it, but when people first saw the iPad they weren't sure either and look at it now.

The Metro UI does work great on the Windows Phone, especially with the Live Tiles updating information. It will be interesting to see what Microsoft comes to market with. It usually tries a lot of ideas and then cuts back when it releases the final version.

Before we upgrade to Windows 8 we will identify the business benefits. Windows 7 was fantastic, after Vista. It made supporting desktops much easier so we updated to it straight away. If Windows 8 has any major benefits, the same principle will apply.

Sage has teamed up with Rackspace to launch customer relationship management (CRM) as a service to small businesses in the UK.

The business software company has introduced a cloud version of SageCRM to be hosted on Rackspace's new hybrid hosting technology, RackConnect

Announcing the relationship, Lorcan Malone, general manager for SageCRM said the product had been designed to help businesses grow by not over-committing resources at an early stage.

Sage CRM Cloud will initially be available in two versions: Essentials, which offers basic CRM functionality and is charged from 20 per month and a Professionals edition, which offers a complete set of functionality, including sales and marketing support. This version is priced from 40 per month.

Features of SageCRM include full contact management and business analytics, smartphone functionality, security over customer data and flexible payment options. The product is also offered on a 30-day free trial basis.

In addition, Malone said that one of the key benefits was that, as opposed to some software vendors, cost of support was included in the price.

With the CRM SaaS space dominated by Salesforce, Sage will obviously have its work cut out to take on its giant competitor but Malone said the company was confident that it could find its niche.

"Salesforce generally aims at companies just above our target market, but it's certainly true that it's looking at the SMB space more," he said. "Our strength, however, is that we're focused exclusively on SMBs and we benefit [them through] our partner support."

Sage has announced a new member of its cloud product family in the shape of Sage One Payroll.

The cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) is targeted specifically at small businesses, with 15 or fewer employees, which might not have the skills in-house to run an efficient payroll system.

The key to the software is automation, making it easier for a non-payroll specialist to use. As well as recording and updating P11 records, it also ensures it is up-to-date with any regulatory changes and works out for the business what statutory payments need to be made.

At the end of the financial year, a tool comes into play for producing reports to send directly to HMRC, removing the need to duplicate the info for the tax office.

All of this can then be accessed by your accountant and any corrections that need to be made can be easily adjusted in the system.

"Sage has a fantastic pedigree within the payroll software space and this expertise has helped shape and inform our first SaaS payroll product," said Chris Stonehouse, head of Sage Online.

"We also spent a lot of time consulting with small businesses and their insights fed into every element from the design to the language used, enabling us to create what we believe is one of the industry's most user-friendly pieces of software for processing the pay run."

The price point is appealing too. Sticking to a pay per seat philosophy, Sage One Payroll comes in at 5 for up to five users, 10 for 10 and 15 for 15. But, even better, businesses can use the service for free up until July 2012.

There is also support around the product, with 24 hour phone lines open for 365 of the year.

Cloud is a better option for mid-market users than SaaS, according to Sage UK as it announced the UK launch of SalesLogix Cloud, a pay-per-user CRM service hosted on Amazon's EC2 platform.

Sage product manager Duncan Woods said that a key difference was that where Sage's existing SaaS offerings are in effect slices of a single common system, each instance of SalesLogix Cloud would be private to that customer and could therefore be customised, upgraded or adapted as needed.

"Going to the cloud enables us to offer all the benefits of an on-premise solution, but have it hosted remotely," he said. "We are finding that the mid-market wants more flexibility, scalability and control than SaaS allows."

Sage said that the cloud version of SalesLogix would also make the system which manages customer interactions and information, and provides insights into business performance more widely accessible, for example in the field. The service provides 100GB of data storage for every 50 users as standard, the company added.

Woods said that Sage's SData web service for data sharing would also make it possible to build hybrid deployments that integrate on-premise systems with the cloud service.

He added that as well as answering customer needs, going to the cloud is also bringing benefits to Sage.

For example, the Amazon platform has made it easier to deploy SalesLogix Cloud for new customers, and he said that the cloud approach has the potential to ease the task of providing 24x7 support.

Sage is in acquisition talks with IBM and SAP, reports have claimed today.

An inside source at the software and services company told Computing the firm was in discussions with both and it would "benefit the business" to link with a larger organisation.

"The structure of the organisation holds us back, and we would certainly benefit from more collateral and capital expenditure," he said.

Although traditionally thought of for its accounting software, Sage has widened its remit and even entered into cloud services at the beginning of this year.

With IBM increasingly focused on the software and services side of the business and SAP leading the way in the sectors, both companies would seem a good fit for Sage.

IT Pro called Sage but it said the company "didn't comment on rumour and speculation."

We also contacted IBM and SAP for comment but they had not returned our request at the time of publication.

Sage has launched a new Software as a Service (SaaS) offering in its first entrance into the cloud computing market.

Sage One is aimed at small businesses and offers online, on-demand and pay monthly accounting software along with support services available all day, everyday.

There are three services available through Sage One:

Cashbook is designed for cash-based businesses to track their transactions, banking activity and to give them a record to show their own accountant.

Accounts is aimed at small firms who want to control their accounts better and offers tools to create invoices, work out and send off VAT returns and get an overview of how the business is performing.

Finally, Accountant Edition is aimed at the professional who, through the online portal, can access their clients' information from any internet connection.

The services, compatible with both Macs and PCs, also feature built in 128 bit encryption to keep data safe.

Cashbook costs 5 per month with additional VAT and Accounts costs 10 per month plus VAT. The Accountant Edition is free for members of the Sage Accountants' Club or costs 250 a year for non-members.

Simon Black, managing director of Sage Online, claimed the company had received great feedback from its beta customers who had got "a real boost" from using the service.

"That's why we believe Sage One will meet and exceed the expectations of a new generation of sole traders, small businesses and entrepreneurs that see the web as a natural way to work," he said.

However, the managing director of rival firm IRIS Software & Services has hit out at the offering, claiming it was merely a mask of modernity from an traditional vendor.

In a statement sent to IT PRO, Phill Robinson said: "The internet has been around for over twenty years, so the reason why Sage's strategy is only now emerging is that it's an old-fashioned software goliath, with an old-fashioned software licencing model, that has continued to feed the Sage beast all these years."

Robinson claimed the company lacked both "imagination and conviction" when it came to investing in innovation and had failed to get across its web strategy to customers.

"As a result, it has raced yet another product to market that is only half-finished and hardly market-ready," he added.

Black slammed the comments, telling IT PRO: "Any notion that we are just getting to grips with SaaS couldn't be further from the truth. Tens of thousands of our customers already use our online family of software and services."

"Sage One isn't about packing in functionality, quite the opposite in fact. It's simple, secure and low-cost software designed for business users who want to take control of their finances without needing any specific accounting knowledge or IT skills."

He added: "Whilst preserving the simplicity that is the essence of Sage One we will be releasing additional features and upgrades at regular intervals over the coming months, all delivered automatically and free of charge."

Businesses of all sizes are generally aware of the security risks associated with smartphones, a RIM director has claimed.

Speaking at a BlackBerry sponsored panel discussion yesterday, senior director of business marketing for RIM in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) Rory O'Neill said many firms understand the risks associated with mobile devices and security will be a growing concern in the business world.

"As the growth of smartphones continues and the types of things people do with smartphones continues, security and other things become really important," O'Neill told IT PRO.

He claimed BlackBerry is ahead of competitors when it comes to security and O'Neill pointed to case studies from across the globe, with RIM phones widely used in governments in the UK and US.

"We think we have architectured our solution in a certain way that it is totally secure from device point of entry through the network, through to transmission, and that is what companies have to think about," he added.

Earlier this year, it emerged the only mobile devices recognised by the UK Government's secure communications department as able to uphold its security standards were BlackBerry ones.

O'Neill also expressed excitement about the BlackBerry 6 OS, which comes with a feature that can split a customer's personal and business phone uses, known as Dual Persona.

"IT teams can carve off sections of databases and lock that down to the enterprise, and have personal profiles on [the phone] where you can access data as if you are a consumer," he explained.

Also present at the event was Simon Howell, client relationship director at accountancy firm taylorcocks, who said his organisation considers smartphone security very seriously, although implementation of this is left up to the IT department.

Even if there is a wide understanding of mobile security issues in enterprises, there are still calls for greater education.

"It is an issue that needs to be talked about," added Gavin May, business development director at Sage.

UK software vendors have struggled to match the presence in Europe enjoyed by their US counterparts, new research has found.

Market researcher Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC) said the UK had a diverse software market that was actually faring well in comparison to it European neighbours.

But, in ranking 200 of the largest software vendors in Europe (based on annual revenue from the region), US firms still dominated with 70 of the top 200 positions and 15 of the top 20 rankings.

The UK accounted for only 34 of the top 200 positions, where just two of the top ten slots were home-grown firms - Sage came in 9th with revenues of 715 million (647.5 million) and Logica was next, ranked 18th with revenues of 297 million (269 million).

Symbian came next, in 30th place with revenues of 182 million (164.8 million). Misys was 49th with 113 million (10.3 million) in software revenues. Northgate took 58th with 110 million (99.6 million), and Reuters rounded out the top-placed UK firms in 68th position with 90 million (81.5 million).

But while they may struggle to match the strength of the US software presence in Europe, UK suppliers weren't doing too badly from a regional perspective. Germany and France accounted for 19 and 20 of the top 200 rankings respectively.

PAC said UK firms tended to remain local or develop larger business outside of Europe, such as Misys' expansion in the US. It also pointed to the recent $775 million (543.9 million) acquisition of US content management firm Interwoven by the UK's Autonomy to boost its North American presence.

Nevertheless, PAC added that it expected the worsening economic climate to accelerate supplier consolidation, particularly among medium-sized players in the European software market.

"Recent deals involving UK players have included Northgate's purchase of Arinso, and Sage's acquisition of numerous UK and European software players (XRT, Tekton, etc.), Fidessa/LatentZero, and Iris/CS Group," it stated.

The researcher also pointed out that, while the US mega-vendors like Microsoft and IBM tend to dominate the systems infrastructure software business, its was the likes of European firms such as SAP and Sage who had strong application software businesses.