Gretchen O’Hara: Building the Next Generation Partner Ecosystem at Sage

Gretchen O'Hara
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Gretchen O'hara: [00:00:00] Back in the day, even when you think about responsible AI and trust AI, there's no place that becomes more important outside of security than in your financial data. You not wanna get those numbers messed up. and so knowing that we have that background and can put sort of the trust brand on these things it gives I think, some relief to our customers who are trying to figure out, how do I do this?

And if it's real and for our partners, it then helps them lead into this AI empowered world. Because. They're delivering on things that will just work.

Chip Rodgers: When you think about you have a broad range of partners, what are the outcomes that you're looking for from partners? And I, maybe that's not fair because there's so many different kinds, but I'm wondering if there's any way that you can

Gretchen O'hara: yeah. Lemme see if I

Chip Rodgers: And then also how do you measure that?

Gretchen O'hara: no, it's a great, it's a great question.

[00:01:00]

Chip Rodgers: Welcome back to another episode of Inside Partnering Chip Rodgers here. And gosh, I'm so excited to be joined by Gretchen O'Hara. Gretchen, welcome.

Gretchen O'hara: Thank you so much, Chip. It's nice to be here. I've been wanting to get it on your podcast for a while, so this is fun to catch up.

Chip Rodgers: That's awesome. Yeah. I you're career, so many years at at Microsoft, and you were just. Icon at Microsoft and the leader, I think 21 years. Is

Gretchen O'hara: Yeah, I don't wanna count. I'm like my 18 year plus. Yeah, it was, while it was

Chip Rodgers: Yeah. Yeah. Terrific. And then and then, most recently with Splunk for three, I think three or four years. And then with the Cisco acquisition and everything and now you're with Sage, which is really exciting.

Gretchen O'hara: I'm really excited. I'm looking forward to having the conversation with you today.

Chip Rodgers: Yeah.

Gretchen O'hara: but thank you. It's been a incredible [00:02:00] journey and Sage is an incredible company to take this next. Step so we can talk more a little bit about it.

Chip Rodgers: Yeah. I let's do that. I'm excited to hear. And so just, formal introduction, Executive Vice President of Strategic Partnerships and Business Development. I know it's a mouthful, but basically Channel Chief for Sage and manage all the partnerships and. Sage has a number, a lot of different kinds of partnerships.

Of course SI partners and, MSPs and technology partners, ISVs and then also you have the, the accounting firms and others, agencies as well. There's pretty broad,

Gretchen O'hara: It's.

Chip Rodgers: And by the way, every, everything's mixing

Gretchen O'hara: And it's all, and all mixing together. You bring up a really, one, one of the things that I love about Sage and the opportunity just being. In channel leadership and being advocate for partnerships and ecosystem. My whole career is that it's a very complex ecosystem.

There's not one [00:03:00] type of partner that Sage works with. And for us to be able to grow and continue to scale, we need to wrap around arms around the entire ecosystem, which your point was we have deep system integrators, we have advisors, we have accountant consultants, we have ISVs and developers that fit into there.

We have VARs, managed service providers. All of these different partners are building on their capabilities not only in our sp space of finance and ERP, but. I think more importantly, what cloud and AI is gonna look like in the future for these partners. So it's been a really exciting opportunity to hear from all of them over the last four and a half weeks.

And I know I'll be learning a lot more.

Chip Rodgers: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I think it's it is, and you just laid out. There are so many different kinds of partners that all wanna be a part of the ecosystem, right? They all have a different play role to play. And some of them play multiple roles. And so it's it's fun.

It's exciting, it's [00:04:00] interesting. It's complex though, as well it has its challenges. So why don't we start Gretchen with, you're now four months into the role.

Gretchen O'hara: Oh, not four months. I'm five, five and a half weeks into the role, but yeah, four, four weeks into the role. But I'll take it, I'll take it. I've had a little bit of chance to get my feet wet.

Chip Rodgers: Yeah. What drew you to Sage and where do you see within your role the kind of impact that you would, will, see in terms of, Sage's next stage of growth?

Gretchen O'hara: Yeah. As you had mentioned in our introduction, I've managed many partners in ecosystems through my career at Microsoft. And then, my most recently at Splunk, but I always had an eye on Sage, even back when I was running developer at Microsoft. Sage was a unique partner because of the ecosystem that it had.

And in fact, I always was, really envious of what Sage had in terms of that [00:05:00] deep partner commitment and, almost this inherent sort of community that has, really rallied around and built, Sage the company. But at the same time, my path has been more on cloud and AI.

I've been, really focused in that particular area. And AI has been a buzzword for a long time. I was on early journeys with that, even at Microsoft. But I know, and I knew back then that I know now that AI is gonna have very practical impact to the ecosystem. And where I think it is gonna start first will be in areas like in finance and accounting areas where we can really help on the productivity side and elevate

the business user's role in a way that becomes very practical a way that becomes very productive, very efficient. And so I think this is where you're gonna see a lot of this out in first areas of full production. And [00:06:00] so with Sage's AI first mentality and vision, it drew me to this incredible opportunity, which you have this, as we talked about, a diverse ecosystem, an incredible innovation story grounded on 40 years of data that makes Sage set up well for the AI era.

But how do we get our partners all there? How do we ultimately get our partner ecosystem moving into. Not only cloud first, but AI first capabilities and their solutions. And that requires a lot of thinking and change. And ways to really partner with our partners to be that force multiplier at scale.

So to me, it had all the exciting things of the innovation and the opportunity and the story, an incredible value of an ecosystem that we wanna transform. And so I'm here to drive that transformation work at Sage.

Chip Rodgers: That's exciting. What a great opportunity.

Gretchen O'hara: It [00:07:00] is, it's really exciting and it's been rewarding just talking to partners around the globe. And I'm, right now I'm in full listening mode your listeners out there. I'm welcoming all feedback. I'm monitoring my social channels. I'm really trying to learn from you all.

But one thing that's very clear is that it's the partners are buzzing and there's just an opportunity that I think our ecosystem at Sage sees, and now it's like, how do we seize on that opportunity and actually turn that into the next step of reality. So it's, there's everyone's excited.

Chip Rodgers: And to that point Gretchen, you just had the, Sage Future for Partners in Barcelona. What an incredible event and what a great way to be. An introduction.

Gretchen O'hara: I know,

Chip Rodgers: right in and there you are, with

Gretchen O'hara: It was incredible onboarding. I don't know if it could have been planned more perfectly.

Chip Rodgers: So what, tell me about that about the event and about you had some really exciting announcements coming out of coming outta that.

Gretchen O'hara: [00:08:00] We really did, it, first of all Sage Future for Partners is an exciting event that is dedicated to our partner ecosystem. It's not only an opportunity to get alignment on where our future is and where to bet with Sage on from a practice perspective, but it's an opportunity for partner to partner and building that community within themselves.

And it's a forum to really unlock and un harness, the potential of partners, and I saw it firsthand. Partners collaborating with partners. How do they go after this particular vertical or micro vertical together, implementation services with VARs looking at how to

band with managed service providers. Lots of conversations, so very exciting. But we had some really exciting announcements as well that I think were very relevant for our partners. And maybe just I'll highlight a couple I think is really exciting. The first is we announced something called the Sage AI for Developers program.

And this is in [00:09:00] partnership with AWS. So we are leveraging the AWS Agentic AI marketplace. To speed to market, our partner's ability to build essentially a AI agents embedded right into Sage and its workflow. So it's gonna provide real value and innovation on top of the core capabilities that our partners are doing.

We're partnering with AWS because it provides the security and foundation and the ability to scale that. And partners are familiar with the Bedrock environment and together then we can speed up that innovation with AI agents that will be a big component of essentially how you work with Sage and interface with Sage in the future.

Lots of interest on that. Ability to sign up for early adopters program now, but just go out to Sage and check it out. If you're in this space and you're looking to grow or even drive incremental revenue and value with your [00:10:00] customers, these agentic AI. Workflow and agent capabilities are gonna be enormous.

Value into the Sage network. So that was really exciting. And then to help our partners go even faster, we also announced one of our own agents, the Finance Intelligent Agent. And this essentially helps then our partners with prepackaged agents, if you will, that they can then, provide instant value to their customers without having to build anything their own.

So they can expand upon this. But it gets, again, customers seeing the value of Sage using co-pilot as a way to, become how you interact. And then these intelligent agents will start to work in the background and create a ton of productivity for our customers. And our partner's now gonna have higher value conversations because

some of these things are now already built in in, in, in favor of our partners. So that was a very exciting announcement. And then the third one, I think for partners that's very [00:11:00] exciting is we announced Sages X3 for the cloud, and X3 has been essentially our manufacturing. Operations, deeper product and has it been a very exciting product and we just recommitted to our partner ecosystem that this is a big bet for Sage. I think sometimes, we gotta be extremely clear on where partner should bet and where. Maybe it's okay, but directionally where do you need to put your chips all in, where do you have to see the future?

And so we made big announcements around that. Having a cloud managed service offering to be able to, help partners scale that faster as well as essentially, having to get out of own private cloud offerings and other sort of hosted options. So really exciting there. And I think partners, were excited about the double down on, on the X3 side.

So lots of that all around opportunity for our partners.

Chip Rodgers: I love that because I think it also [00:12:00] that's X3 Cloud then is more, is focused more on the industry, on very specific industry solutions, which I think partners will love, right? Because

Gretchen O'hara: love it.

Chip Rodgers: get very, deep into capabilities and they have expertise in those and they can really bring that.

Gretchen O'hara: And it's what, one of the things that, I've always been a fan of industry forever. And one of the things that it does for our partners is it really differentiates their value to your point. It creates that level of specialization that, Sage will never get full last mile, but it customer needs to speak in the language that they operate in and the more value you can bring into

not just the industry, but in the vertical into even a micro vertical. Now, you as a partner are speaking the language of the SMB customer, and that differentiates in such a huge way. So our partners are extremely excited about that. We're, again, I think betting on a deeper industry strategy as well, and it just gives more opportunity for differentiation and [00:13:00] value creation for our ecosystem.

Chip Rodgers: Love it. Love it. Tell me a little bit more about the Sage AI Developer Solutions as well. I think I had seen that it was built on Bedrock. That's really cool. And I, but I had not heard until you just mentioned it, that it will help partners deploy on the Agent Marketplace, which is awesome.

That's and that's been growing. So I'm actually, I'm talking to Matt Yanchyshyn later

Gretchen O'hara: Oh, good. Okay. Tell I said hi.

Chip Rodgers: So I will tell 'em, I'll tell 'em we talked about it and yeah. And I know that it's it's grown. When it launched it was like 900, so now it's up to a couple thousand. So that is really, there's a lot of partner investment that's going into that.

So I think that sounds like a really great, value for partners.

Gretchen O'hara: Yeah, no question. And I think you know, a lot of partners. Want to be able to again, make their bet on how they're going to get these agents into the [00:14:00] hands of customers and make that as friction free as possible and have the security and capability around that. So I think that's gonna be a big bet.

AWS is gonna grow. We're betting on that as well. And it gives direction to our partners on where to invest. So I think we're gonna see like the acceleration on that one in a big way. But the other one that I think is really incredible about AI, the Sages AI for developers is we have also launched essentially our trust brand.

And one of the things that, you know. Back in the day, even when you think about responsible AI and trust AI, there's no place that becomes more important outside of security than in your financial data. You not wanna get those numbers messed up. And there's a lot of hype around, a lot of startups coming, I'm sure that you're seeing them come out of areas in the Bay and others that the tout this new [00:15:00] agentic AI opportunity, but it has to be grounded in hundreds of thousands of transactions and millions of data.

And the think of Sage now, some odd what, 40 years of ongoing data and understanding the financials behind it.

The network

Chip Rodgers: As a customer, who are you gonna trust? You're gonna trust somebody that

Gretchen O'hara: So we can't screw it up. And and so knowing that we have that background and can put sort of the trust brand on these things it gives I think, some relief to our customers who are trying to figure out, how do I do this?

And if it's real and for our partners, it then helps them lead into this AI empowered world. Because. They're delivering on things that will just work. And that's gonna be the key, which is there's a lot of hype, but when you come to core areas like accounting and financials it's gotta, it's gotta work and it's [00:16:00] gotta be right.

And

Chip Rodgers: any hallucinations.

Gretchen O'hara: As soon as you start to self-doubt, like you know what this actually means is this right now you've lost the whole productivity that was supposed to come, from the beginning. We don't see AI as a replacement for people. We see AI is

enablement for productivity, right? It's the ability for our partners to scale and move upstream on value. It's opportunity for customers to be more productive in that work environment. Putting their skills into things around the analysis and insight and some of the, letting some of the reports and agents do its work.

Chip Rodgers: Do you, Gretchen, do you have any for partners out there, do you have any initial thoughts about where partners, where the investment areas might be in the developer solutions? Are there, certain kinds of either horizontal, vertical, whatever, anything that's you're seeing.

Gretchen O'hara: We're seeing we're seeing honestly like across the board, we're seeing [00:17:00] everything from SIs build intelligent agents to help with faster onboarding, to ISVs and developers integrating, additional workflows into last mile, let's say in construction real estate.

We're seeing even the horizontals where you're looking at just being able to, do data migration and aggregate data and being able to have those in some powerful reports and analytics and all of those things are now gonna be topped with agents that can help be proactive on how to think of these things.

So I think that's what the, so much excitement because the technology is there. The backing of SAGE now, and the, we've been working on this for seven years at Sage. It's not like we just came on this, like we've been building our AI strategy for a very long time. But it has to be right and it has to be real, has to be authentic, and customers and partners have to trust it.

So we've been slowly, getting ready. And that's what we'll do on the developer [00:18:00] program too. It's early adopter. We will work with partners to develop these first set of agents. They will be, tested and trusted. And then we'll release 'em to, to the market. So we're not gonna just unleash and all of a sudden there'll be, a hundred thousand agents tomorrow and it will be in a managed way just so that we can guarantee those capabilities in the short term.

And then of course we'll scale over time.

Chip Rodgers: Matt wouldn't mind if you had a hundred thousand agents on the market.

Gretchen O'hara: I, I wouldn't mind that either. I wouldn't mind that either. We gotta, we got the, we gotta get the first round, right? But you can imagine to your point, think about how many agents each ISV might have in various parts of their product tied into right into Sage platform. You could start to look at 10.

12 different agents that one partner might even just be delivering. So you can see the multiplier effect of this in a very fast way. So the opportunity is there. I think for us now, it's really about, okay, now [00:19:00] we gotta get the monetization right. And how do we look at, what, how do we charge for these agents and what that looks like.

And I think it's, the next step we'll work with the partner community on.

Chip Rodgers: Yeah. Cool.

Gretchen O'hara: Yeah. Yeah.

Chip Rodgers: When you think about, let's shift shifting gears a little bit. When you think about you have a broad range of partners, what are the outcomes that you're looking for from partners? And I, maybe that's not fair because there's so many different kinds, but I'm wondering if there's any way that you can

Gretchen O'hara: yeah. Lemme see if I

Chip Rodgers: And then also how do you measure that?

Gretchen O'hara: no, it's a great, it's a great question. Measurement for partners is always one that is. Like a challenge and just, you wanna crack that. So I'll come back to the measurement in a second. There's a couple of things that from partner outcomes, we wanna grow together.

So growth is a really big area for us collectively. How do we bring in our co-sell motion. How do we bring lead opportunities to our partners and how do we accelerate growth and new customer acquisition? So growth for sure is definitely one [00:20:00] we'll continue to measure. But innovation also is one, we want to not only just be able to, sell with our partners.

We wanna co-innovate with our partners. The AI for Developers is a great example of that. But. We wanna be able to look at, how do we continue to expand on the IP and how do we embed much of that into the Sage network and how do we bring more value together to our mutual customers?

So that co-innovation is very big piece. And so we, we measure that on the marketplace and Sage's marketplace to be set up there for success. And then we also have to think about, profitability and so are we making sure that partners can actually have a and maintain a profitable practice?

And then how do we feed that over time with expansion of additional practice areas, additional products? So that basically our partners who are very good at what they do can expand into adjacent [00:21:00] markets. That is another area that we look at and, we build our joint business plans together with our partners to, achieve these outcomes together.

And then of course. What is now very important is we have our native cloud products is customer success. And so how do our partners come in to make sure they're bringing real value? The utilization is there and they're they're making sure that. Customers are fully onboarded to what they are purchasing so they see immediate time to value in those implementations.

So that is shifting more as we have more growth now in some of the cloud native products that we have. Measurement's an interesting one. And it'll be one I'll be working on. So we will have to come back and check in on progress, it's really important because we wanna show the

force multiplier that partners are bringing in the ecosystem, whether they transact with us or not. And and so you have to be able to measure in some way to be [00:22:00] able to showcase that. So it just brings value back into the partners. So we do standard measurements that you can imagine, like anyone, we look at things like, revenue and we look at growth.

We look at expansion market penetration numbers with our partners. We also look at capability. In terms of, what they're able to actually do with their product and capacity. Can they manage 10 customers? Can they manage a hundred thousand customers? And what does that look like?

So we measure those. Where we wanna get better is measuring both our indirect and our direct indirect channel. Meaning that not everything has to lead to transaction, but we wanna be able to measure both the influence engagement as well as the direct engagement with our ecosystem. So we'll have some work to do over time to, to get there which will be really fun.

But in the meantime we build together essentially these go-to market plans that will make sure that we have mutual outcomes that are aligned to our joint priorities.

Chip Rodgers: Yeah. [00:23:00] Yeah. Love that. You just laid out a whole bunch of them,

Gretchen O'hara: yeah. Yeah. And I'm sure again, the thing that, I would coach partners to continue to think about is. There's gonna be continuing evolution in this space. And I think people know this. There's just so much that's happening. And the balance of what's on the truck today, and we try to balance that.

Here's what Sage offers today. And you can make a lot of, you can build an incredible practice and there's a lot of opportunity, but have one step in the future so that as the customers in the market shift, you're there with us to, to support that in the long haul. And that's gonna take enablement, that's gonna take technical sales, marketing, enablement's gonna take foundational things, how to do things maybe differently with ai.

And so Sage is here to help do all of that, which will be a big component as we move to that AI empowered.

Chip Rodgers: That's so important. Just enable, partner enablement so that they're, because they're bas, they're, you can't be [00:24:00] everywhere, right? So they're out there representing Sage and they need to be able to answer the right questions the right way, right?

Gretchen O'hara: that that's exactly it. And the thing is, the more that we can get our partners to clearly understand the depth technically of our product and capabilities, but also just, business questions. Getting to standard playbooks, so forth and so on.

It just makes our channel highly confident in being able to continue to grow with those customers. So we have to we have to continue and in my opinion, not take the the foot off the gas on that one. We've gotta continue to invest in the practice building and the technical enablement that's gonna help 'em continue to grow in this new AI world.

And so we're committed to doing that.

Chip Rodgers: Yeah. Okay. So Gretchen, I wanna double click on something you said just a little bit earlier, which I thought was really interesting. You talked about partner profitability, which I think is really, I don't hear that talked about a lot, but I think it's really valuable [00:25:00] for partners to know that you're on their side and you're gonna help them build a profitable business.

How do you think about that?

Gretchen O'hara: Oh it's one of the things that I think, partners that I learned from Sage was having a lot of conversations about, because they might have grown up with Sage, they have an existing practice with Sage, but what are the plans to grow other than through acquisition? What does that look like over time?

And it starts with having this profitable practice, and it starts with shifting. Your revenues to, an ARR revenue stream or, a recurring revenue stream. And that, that fundamental shift is gonna help start to get these partners in a place of high profitability and then lowering the cost.

Through things that we're doing, whether that's again, faster time to implementation for them so they can bring value added services up upstream. Making it easy to manage in the case of X3 cloud reducing implementation times. These are all things that we wanna do on this sort of profitability [00:26:00] journey.

So that one. They're growing their top line and we have growth together and big aspirational growth numbers, but they're more efficient in the way that they take people off the bench. They're, applying their services to and that they, can hold that value with the customer and make a lot of money doing it.

I think it's important that we, we always talk about revenue and we always talk about growth, and I would never take anything away from that. But if you can't have a profitable practice. Then you start looking maybe I gotta start to expand somewhere else and I want all my partners to stay with, I don't wanna expand anywhere else.

But I, but we have to be committed to helping them grow and grow that profitably. And so that's some of the big areas and we're continuing to invest in and look at, and, something that is big for me to make sure that our partners can see the benefits of that.

Chip Rodgers: Gretchen, this has been fantastic. Gosh, I really appreciate you taking some time and [00:27:00] congratulations on the next on your.

Gretchen O'hara: Thank you.

Chip Rodgers: And you're off

Gretchen O'hara: really exciting. Yeah, we're gonna have to we'll have to do another check back as we get closer to, to Sage Futures. There'll be a lot more I'm sure that we'll wanna talk about. But it's always fun catching up with you, Chip. It's great to see you and I appreciate the time.

Chip Rodgers: Let's do that. I'd love to do that. Yeah. Gretchen thank you for joining and thank you all for joining as well and we will see you next time. Remember to like, share and subscribe on substack and we'll see you all next time. Thanks everybody. Thanks Gretchen.

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