Sage engages developer community with Sage Labs

Business software firm Sage has launched an online platform designed to give its ecosystem of developers the resources to build more innovative and compelling add-ons and extensions for its mid-market software.

Sage Labs is an online portal which allows developers in the Sage community to download and modify source code under a permissive open source licence, in a move which the firm hopes will ultimately lead to apps which provide a better customer experience.

The portal will help to showcase new and emerging technologies and how they can be applied to Sage software, as well as spotlighting little known features in existing products, said the firm.

Stuart Lynn, head of R&D for Sage's mid-market division, told V3.co.uk that in the mid-market the vendor solution can only provide 90 per cent of the required functionality, so it is vital that there is a strong developer partner community to extend the products according to specific customer requirements.

"The portal acts as an innovation crowd-sourcing platform whereby ideas from multiple sources can be proposed, discussed, prototyped and released to customers in a non disruptive way," he added.

"This agile approach means that customers no longer have to wait for the next major release of the software to benefit from some of these innovative ideas."

Sage Labs has not only been designed to ensure that the firm can respond more rapidly to changing customer needs, but to deliver improved value to Sage's 900-strong community of developers through features such as blogs and forums, the firm said.

The first project is an extension to the Sage 200 suite, allowing the corresponding data to be configured and integrated with map data on the web, according to Sage.