Hare described the coming product as a "more functionally rich tier of this solution for professional user, those users that are more finance focused require additional capability and management tools.”

Sage will start the roll out of the new product in the United Kingdom during the current fiscal year. The application is expected both to appeal to new customers and also offer a migration path for Sage 50 customers who want a native cloud product.

The migration from Sage 50 is complicated by the wide variation in how much functionality customers use in the older product, Hare said, noting Sage will not force users to migrate.

“So if you're using all of the functionality of Sage 50, then this first version is not going to be quite as functionally rich,” he noted. Hare added. “We'll encourage them to migrate over time, but remember we've only just migrated most of them onto cloud connected, so there's probably a bedding-in period.”