"The name change is nothing more than an evolution and connecting the products as part of Sage Business Cloud," says Ron McMurtie, Sage's chief marketing officer.

The Sage Business Cloud is comprised by products that range from small-business accounting packages to software for enterprise-level companies. These include Sage One, Live and X3, which have been renamed Sage Accounting, Financials and Enterprise Management.

At one point, Robert Reid, CEO of Intacct, which was purchased by Sage last year, said Live would be the product in the middle of the field outside of the United States; Intacct in the U.S., although that point has not been repeated by Sage executives.

For resellers, changing Sage 100c to Sage 100 Cloud was a major point. Those who criticized the move called it deceptive—trying to picture a package  as a cloud product, which is not truly a cloud product. However, those criticizing the move did not to be publicly identified.

McMurtie denied the claim "In no way are we trying to be deceptive," he said. McMurtie marketing materials will be clear that Sage 100 Cloud is a desktop product with some cloud capabilities.

All products in the business cloud were developed separately and do not work together. Sage is developing the appreciation programming interfaces that will enable them and third-party products to interoperate. The process is not expected to be completed for 36 months but connections should come to market over the period.