Sage is incorporating human resources tools from the software vendor Fairsail into its financial cloud Sage Life as it seeks to extend the reach of its latest product.
Built on the Salesforce1 platform, the expanded Life will target the small and medium businesses that have long been the core audience for Sage, whose partnership with Salesforce caught the software industry by surprise last month.
Santiago Solanas, CMO at Sage, said: "As both a Salesforce and Sage partner, Fairsail’s award-winning product is perfectly aligned to provide small and medium businesses with a world-class HR system as part of the Sage Life family of products."
Fairsail’s partnership with Sage follows a similar deal from the professional services automation firm Kimble, which agreed to integrate its tools into the Sage Life platform earlier this week, as reported by CBR.
The move also comes during what Adam Hale, chief executive of Fairsail, has described as a return to the "war for talent" era of the 1990s in which demographic shifts made competition for skills fiercer than usual.
Hale told CBR that as companies look to grow as the economy moves out of recession they need to acquire talent and manage their workforces, an area of business he believes is currently underserved in the software market.
"Many organisations struggle with even simple questions such as: ‘How many employees do you have?’" he said.
Salesforce’s deal with Sage has also raised questions about whether the cloud company, which has traditionally focused on customer relationship management tools, will expand outside of its original remit, a query that has dogged the cloud giant for years.
Commenting on this, Hale said: "What Salesforce has been very clear on is they do not provide financials and HR apps, but they want a vibrant set of partners on the platform to do that."
