In a channel email Sage, today announced the 12/31/2021 retirement of Taylor Macdonald.
Taylor served as the Intacct channel sales leader for over 11 years. Prior to that, he served shorter stints at Sage, Deltek and Prometheus.
He may be most widely recognized for his initial highly successful 9-year run building the Sage North America partner channel from 1998 – 2007.
Taylor was instrumental in starting and promoting numerous programs for partners such as sales and consulting academies which were multi-day conferences providing education and a chance for peer group networking.
He departed Sage in 2007 during a corporate reorganization that saw Sage Group PLC begin to significantly revamp the North American management structure.
After stints running the partner channel at Deltek and Promethean, Taylor landed at Intacct where he completely revamped their channel program.
As part of their new direction, Sage anticipated the rising influence of cloud computing.
The company created a much-touted new product – Sage Live – only to quietly discontinue it for new customers in 2018. The discontinuation of this new product may have played some role in the subsequent May 2019 departure of Sage Group PLC CEO Stephen Kelly.
In the midst of their desire to become known as a cloud company, Sage purchased Intacct for $850 million in 2017.
This began another run where Taylor, as Intacct’s channel chief, again joined Sage and continued building and integrating their channels.
Recently Sage has seen the departure of Intacct executives with Marc Linden – who had been Intacct’s CFO quietly departing in 2019. Rob Reid, the former Intacct President, took a Sage board seat/chairmanship before retiring in April 2021. Kathleen Lord left in 2020 after a 14-year career at Intacct and a short stint leading the Sage People HR offering.
According to Sage’s announcement ( below ) Nancy Teixeira, who currently leads the mid-market sales channel in North America will fill in on an interim basis beginning October 1, 2021. Interestingly enough the announcement was made by Sage’s US leader Nancy Harris who on June 21, 2021, had announced her plans to retire “later this year”.
Important news about our Sage VAR channels
Dear Partners,
I hope this message finds you and your families safe and well and your businesses prospering.
I wanted to let you know that after more than 30 successful years running his own firm as a partner and leading partner organizations, Taylor Macdonald has decided to retire at the end of this calendar year.
For those of you who don’t know, Taylor has had two strong tenures building Sage-related ecosystems: first with Sage from 1998 to 2007 and then with Sage Intacct from 2010 through this year. Taylor joined Sage Intacct and built the partner channel and associated program from the ground up. The Sage Intacct VAR channel is now 100+ partners strong, and we’re proud that Taylor and the team have built one of the most successful programs in the industry.
We deeply appreciate Taylor’s many years of service and wish him all the best in his next chapter!
In the meantime, Taylor will help us transition the organization to a new design, working with Nancy Teixeira who runs our Sage partner sales and programs organization. Taylor and Nancy and their teams will work closely together to bring our VAR teams into a single organization. Effective October 1, Nancy Teixeira will become interim VP of the combined organization reporting directly to me.
This new design will simplify our relationship with you as you work with one unified organization—and as we work together to scale our businesses in FY22 and beyond.
Please join me in wishing all the best to Taylor in his retirement and to Nancy as she steps into her new leadership role.
Thank you all for your partnership and your dedication to our customers!
Best regards,
Nancy Harris
EVP, Managing Director
Sage
