We have received the following advance announcement from Sage Software regarding the release of the 2020 edition of Sage 50. This is the first notice we have received that there is in fact a 2020 edition in the works, and that it will be made available in July of 2019.

The title of the announcement from Sage made a possible hint that, starting with the 2020 Edition, only the Sage 50cloud version will be available for purchase, signaling the end of perpetual licensing for Sage 50 customers. While it is too soon to confirm this, we are expecting to hear further news about this change either at or immediately after the Sage Summit Conference in Atlanta on May 12-15.

We will send out an email blast to all of our Sage 50 users as soon as we are able to verify Sage’s plans for the future of the Perpetual (non-subscription) version. Users who are running on earlier versions of Sage 50 who are not presently on a Sage BusinessCare plan, or who do not want to purchase an annually-renewable subscription to Sage 50, should begin to think about upgrading existing licenses before July of 2019.

Here is the full text of today’s announcement from Sage:

Due to a required upgrade to Actian Zen v13 (formerly Pervasive) in the Sage 50—U.S. Edition 2020.0 release scheduled in July 2019, SAN members and Certified Consultants/Partners supporting clients on older versions of Sage 50cloud will no longer be able to maintain versions prior to 2019, along with 2020, on the same computer.

The Pervasive License Check for Sage 50 US versions 2018.2 and earlier specifically look for a Pervasive version 11 license key.  When you install Sage 50 US 2020.0, Pervasive will upgrade to version 13 Actian Zen on the machine.  As part of this upgrade, Pervasive/Actian makes the v11 keys inactive, leaving the new v13 keys.   This will cause the earlier version of Sage 50 to no longer work as it will not have the proper key.

It is also important to note that Sage 50 2018.2 and earlier versions are no longer customer-supported releases, so this an opportunity to discuss upgrade options with your clients.

 Why We Are Upgrading from Pervasive v11 to Actian Zen (v13)

Actian Zen v13 better supports Windows 10 and offers better Windows 10 compatibility. An upgrade is in order to receive the updated maintenance that Actian has developed into v13. 

In addition, the updated version of Actian offers improvements to installation which should result in fewer Actian and Sage 50 installation issues.  As well, this version enables updates to activation including a change that should significantly reduce broken keys that today cause the need to reactivate. 

What You Can Do Now

In order to avoid any issues when installing Sage 50 2020.0, we strongly recommend that you take necessary action prior to the July release. This includes upgrading your clients to the latest version of Sage 50, acquiring the necessary equipment needed to run the different versions of Sage 50 on separate machines, and/or running Virtual Machines like VMware.

While the content of this announcement from Sage does not directly effect anyone who is not running multiple versions of Sage 50 on the same computer – and we do not know of any clients that do this – it does provide advanced notice of a change in the database handler (Pervasive) which supports the Sage 50 database. This change could create some “issues” on some older systems as the change rolls out.

We will keep everyone informed once we have a copy of the new edition and have an opportunity to test it by converting some older databases.

If you have any questions about this announcement, or about your edition of Sage 50 and what it may portend for your future use of the software, please don’t hesitate to give us a call at 601-941-2116, or email us at [email protected]. We will do our best to keep everyone up to date on options for using Sage 50 going forward.