Sage has a strategy to move customers from its old, outdated on-premise software to new cloud products. It sounds great but the execution of this strategy is hopelessly poor. The engineering teams are spread much MUCH too thinly on projects that add no value and make no sense. And the company is horribly weighed down by its out of date legacy products and seems to have no clue how to change that. The execs have at least recognised this and have said we need to "ruthlessly prioritise". But there is no follow-through. We still spend most of our time on pointless projects. I've personally tried calling out some of these pointless projects only to be dismissed out of hand. The execs seem to have no insight whatsoever into what is valuable and what is just a waste of time. As a result, the cloud products are not making fast enough progress.
And then there is the performance review system. As many other reviewers have said - there is a forced ranking in place where people are arbitrarily rated as "unsatisfactory" to hit some notional distribution curve. Those victims at the bottom are then managed out. It's basically a way of cutting headcount/costs without having to pay severance. Admittedly, some teams/people are certainly not performing well, but the arbitrary forced ranking just shows that the senior managers are not in touch with what is going on in their teams. If they were, they could target the poor performers. Appalling and almost unbelievable in this day and age, but I have seen it first hand. The reviewers here are telling the truth. Don't believe any denials from HR. (Can't believe I'm saying this about a company I've worked for for over 10 years).
The result of all this? Sage is failing to deliver on its cloud strategy as is clearly demonstrated by the recent half-year results and profit warning. It's people are terribly demotivated, as demonstrated by the reviews on this site - compare Sage to it's competition.
I honestly can't see how the company can turn itself around without a massive change in management, a crash in revenue growth while it sorts out its cloud products and then (just maybe) a return to sustainable growth.