This past month has been a busy one here at Summit Hosting, as we have been out and about connecting with our Sage customers and partners from coast to coast.
First, we headed to beautiful Portland, Oregon for Sage Sessions CRE, a conference dedicated to Sage’s Sage 100 Contractor and Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate customers (or Master Builder and Timberline, as many of the attendees of us, nostalgically refer to them). The event was held at The Nines, a luxury hotel in the heart of downtown Portland.
Since most of us are used to attending conferences in places like Atlanta, Vegas, and Orlando, you may be wondering, why Portland? Well, it all started 30+ years ago in Beaverton, a suburb of Portland, with Timberline Software. Timberline was purchased by Sage in the early 2000s and later rebranded to Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate. There is still a Sage office in the area where many long-time employees work every day to improve the experience for construction companies using Sage products. The partners who have been offering these products since the beginning are no strangers to Portland, having attended many a conference there over the years, so it was a bit sentimental for them to reunite in the city where the software they’ve built their businesses on for so many years has its roots.
The turnout was impressive, with around 300 partners, customers, and Sage employees in attendance. It’s been quite a few years since this group had its own dedicated Sage conference, and the attendees applauded Sage for bringing the community together in Portland.
The event kicked off with a Welcome Reception in the expo area. Between greeting long-time friends and colleagues, the attendees visited the various exhibitors to learn more about tools to enhance their Sage CRE solutions.
We were on hand answering questions about what it means to move Sage to a private cloud dedicated server. Many of the attendees told us they’d been considering making the move for a while, so they were eager to learn more about how easy we can make it for them.
Sessions included a wide variety of topics directed toward construction companies. The consultant track provided more technical dives into topics like Sage Field Ops and Service Ops and Sage Paperless Construction. There was also an “Emerging Technologies” track with topics such as the use of drones, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the Internet of Things, all as they pertain to construction.
For many years, Sage CRE users who wanted to attend a Sage conference were offered Sage Summit, which has historically been a joint conference across all of Sage North America’s product lines. For the attendees, having their own conference with so much content that was relevant to their businesses seemed to resonate quite well. So much so that we’re told the event will return to Portland next year, most likely even bigger and better.
Thank you to Sage for hosting this event and to all our partners and customers who spent time with us in Portland! If you're interested in learning more about the benefits of cloud-hosted Sage, don't hesitate to contact one of our expert hosting specialists today.