Sage Group

The Sage Group plc, commonly known as Sage, is a British multinational enterprise software company headquartered in Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom. It is the world's third-largest supplier of enterprise resource planning software (behind Oracle and SAP), the largest supplier to small businesses, and has 6.1 million customers worldwide. It has offices in 24 countries. The company is the patron of The Sage Gateshead music venue in Gateshead.

Sage is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.

History

1981 to 2000

The Company was founded by David Goldman together with Paul Muller and Graham Wylie in 1981 in Newcastle, to develop estimating and accounting software for small businesses.

A student at Newcastle University, Graham Wylie, took a summer job with an accountancy firm funded by a government small business grant to write software to help their record keeping. This became the basis for Sage Line 50. Next, hired by David Goldman to write some estimating software for his printing company, Campbell Graphics, Graham used the same accounting software to produce the first version of Sage Accounts. David was so impressed that he hired Graham and academic Paul Muller to form Sage, selling their software first to printing companies, and then to a wider market through a network of resellers.