Sage North America Sells Tax Compliance Services Business, Enterprise-Level Customer Base to Empower Corporation

IRVINE, CA--(Marketwire - March 5, 2009) - Sage North America announced today an agreement with Empower Corporation, formerly Empagio Corporation, through which Empower has acquired Sage North America's tax compliance services business and enterprise-level customer base, and will provide outsourced tax compliance services to Sage Abra HRMS customers. The business being acquired by Empower is currently marketed as Sage Compliance Services, and managed under Sage North America's Employer Solutions business unit.

The new relationship enables Sage to better leverage its core strength in delivering HRMS (human resource management system) software and services for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) in North America, and allows Empower to provide important services to its customers and market.

"Our relationship with Empower allows us to continue to offer small and mid-sized businesses the same level of tightly integrated tax compliance services with our Sage Abra HRMS products that we deliver today," said Karl Grass, senior vice president and general manager of Employer Solutions at Sage. "At the same time, we redirect resources to focus on further strengthening the Sage Abra HRMS line, which is the strategic core of our Employer Solutions business."

"We are pleased to expand our suite of Human Resources Solutions for mid-large companies through this agreement," said Seth Bernstein, Empower's CEO. "Empower will be an even stronger company with the addition of Sage North America's payroll tax compliance services business; a tremendous and experienced group of dedicated employees; and some of America's strongest and best-known companies on our already long list of Fortune 500 companies."

As a result of the transaction, Empower will continue to perform the day-to-day operations of the Sage Compliance Services business, located in Dallas, Texas.

Sage Abra HRMS is Sage North America's award-winning HR/payroll software for SMBs in North America. The company continues to build on that leadership with innovative new tools for employers. In the recent past, Sage North America has launched new options to run Sage Abra HRMS either as a turn-key hardware/software solution, or in a hosted environment; an SQL-based payroll option; Sage Payroll PayCards, a new option that enables companies to pay their employees with pre-loaded paycards that operate like cash; and Sage Compliance Trainer, an online HR compliance training solution for employers.

About Empower Corporation

Empower, formerly Empagio and headquartered in Orlando, Florida, provides Payroll, Human Resources, and Workforce Time & Labor Management Solutions software and services to many of the Fortune 100 companies. Empower is a robust platform that has been servicing large corporations for over 25 years. Empower is dedicated to providing superior service along with state of the art Payroll and Human Resources solutions. The software and services are highly reliable and produce over 100 million paychecks annually. For more information, please visit www.empowersoftware.com.

About Sage North America

Sage North America is part of The Sage Group plc, a leading global supplier of business management software and services. At Sage, we live and breathe business every day. We are passionate about helping our customers achieve their ambitions. Our range of business software and services is continually evolving as we innovate to answer our customers' needs. Our solutions support accounting, operations, customer relationship management, human resources, time tracking, merchant services and the specialized needs of the construction, distribution, healthcare, manufacturing, nonprofit and real estate industries. Sage North America employs approximately 4,800 people and supports 2.9 million small and medium-size business customers. The Sage Group plc, formed in 1981, was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1989 and now employs more than 14,500 people and supports more than 5.8 million customers worldwide. For more information, please visit the web site at www.sagenorthamerica.com or call 866-308-2378.

© 2009 Sage Software, Inc. All rights reserved. Sage, Sage Software, Sage logos and the Sage product and service names mentioned herein are registered trademarks or trademarks of Sage Software, Inc. or its affiliated entities. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Contact Information: Press Contacts: John Schoutsen Sage 905-267-2873 john.schoutsen@sage.com Cynthia Sutton Sage 703-793-2700 ext. 3032 cynthia.sutton@sage.com Robert Purcifull Empower Corporation 949-863-9002 rpurcifull@empagio.com