Sage acquires Compass, given SME's new direction (image credit Pixabay/Pexels)
Sage acquires Compass, given SME’s new direction
Frank van Baar, EVP Data Science at Sage (Source linkedin)
Frank van Baar, EVP Data Science at Sage

Sage has announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Compass. Based in San Francisco Compass provides dashboards with automated management reports and benchmarks for small and medium sized online businesses. With more than 34,000 signed up customers, it helps track business performance across both ecommerce platforms and marketing initiatives. Benchmarks provide companies with the knowledge of whether they are performing well in comparison to other vendors.

The Compass team will fall under Frank van Baar, ‎EVP Data Science at Sage. It will strengthen the analytics abilities of Sage for its customers. Van Baar commented: “Small businesses are the heroes of the economy, creating 2/3rds of all jobs. The fact that so many fail within their first year is a huge risk to the future health of the global economy. Last year we launched the Sage Forum for Business Builders, promising to bring greater insight to businesses around the world. This acquisition is a key building block in delivering that promise.”

Enterprise analytics for SME

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed in the initial announcement. Compass has raised at least $4.7 million in funding since its launch from Startup Genome in three seed rounds. (source Crunchbase).

What Compass delivers to Sage is an analytics engine that will enable it to provide relevant information to small businesses to accelerate growth. These kinds of metrics have only been available to larger enterprises previously. The use of benchmarking also brings relevance and actionable insights from the data for those SME with smaller volume. Compass draws information from a wide variety of sources including Facebook.

One customer, Brotliebling commented: “We love Compass… The custom benchmarks have helped us to set our monthly goals, identify problems (e.g. conversion rate problems) and support critical decisions (e.g. which acquisition channels to focus on).”

It will be interesting to see how Sage integrates the new app they have bought and to which of its systems they integrate to. Sage state that their intent is to use Compass to deliver the kind of analytics to SME’s that are already available from large enterprise solutions. Compass provides a unlimited free trial to customers that uses the last two months of data from a single store.an initial trial for two months before its pricing model kicks in. There is a pro version that starts from US$49 per month that analyses data from multiple stores with 2+ years of data. There is also an Enterprise plan offering that has P.O.A..

Conclusion

There are a lot of synergies between these two companies. Both target the SME market and this alignment is key to the success of the acquisition. For Compass it will enable it to grow its customer base quickly with using the larger Sage footprint. Bjoern Lasse Herrmann, CEO of Compass commented: “At Compass we built the largest ecommerce information network empowering merchants to learn from each other. We are excited to join forces with Sage to drive our shared vision of helping businesses to unleash their growth potential.”

With Sage Summit coming to London next week one wonders whether more information will be available. It is not clear whether the deal has closed or when it will do so.

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