Steve Hare

Steve Hare serves as CEO of Sage Group, the UK's largest listed technology company and one of the world's leading providers of business management software for small and mid-sized businesses. Sage serves over 6 million customers across more than 20 countries with accounting, payroll, HR, and ERP solutions — making it one of the three global pillars of SMB business software alongside Intuit and Xero. Under Hare, Sage has executed a fundamental business model transition from perpetual license desktop software to cloud-native SaaS (Software as a Service). Key cloud products include Sage Intacct (mid-market cloud financial management — the fastest-growing product), Sage Business Cloud Accounting (small business), and Sage People (HR/payroll). This migration has driven increasing recurring revenue, improving revenue visibility, and expanding margins as the one-time license revenue shifts to subscription. The cloud transition is particularly important because it transforms customer relationships: cloud customers update automatically, use AI-powered features, and demonstrate higher retention than desktop users. Sage's geographic diversification (UK, North America, France, Germany, South Africa, and others) provides natural hedging against single-market risk. Key stock drivers include cloud revenue growth, recurring revenue as a percentage of total, Sage Intacct new customer wins, desktop-to-cloud migration rates, churn reduction, and competitive positioning against Intuit, Xero, and Oracle NetSuite.