If you’ve been using a Sage 300 for a while you will have lived through numerous name changes starting with Accpac and now landing on Sage 300cloud. This is really no different.
Let’s try to shed some light on this for you.
Despite what the name may imply, Sage 300cloud is still the same on premise product that you know an love. The cloud part of the name, according to Sage, refers to the cloud connected capabilities. I’m sure that makes everything clear now. No?
OK, let’s take a bit further. The world is moving to cloud solutions and industry stats bear this out. Not to mention the COVID-19 situation that accelerated the process.
Sage gets a lot of feedback from its customers on what they want to see in their products. What Sage is saying is that its customers are not ready to go completely cloud but want to enjoy some of the benefits that the cloud provides. That’s where Sage’s hybrid cloud strategy was born. The core accounting function stays on premise while additional capabilities are added through cloud connected offerings that integrate with Sage 300 but live in the cloud. Some examples of this are Sage AP Automation, Sage Inventory Advisor, Webtelligence, and Sage Sales Tax to name a few.
Now that we have that cleared up, what else do you need to know?
Well, Sage 300cloud works on a subscription model. That means that you essentially pay as you go to use it. Stop paying and you lose the ability to enter new transactions but never lose access to your data. 
That’s different from the traditional on premise perpetual license model that has customers pay a large license fee up front and annual maintenance (M&S) fees that entitle you to any upgrades that became available. You could keep using the software (latest version available while you were on a maintenance plan) even though you may stop paying the annual M&S.
Sage, like most software publishers, is providing incentives for customers to migrate to their subscription offerings, and disincentives to stay on perpetual licensing. For example, perpetual licensing costs and M&S are increasing at a greater rate than subscription costs are increasing making it less attractive over time to be on the perpetual license model.
Another thing to be aware of is, in order to be eligible to get any of these connected applications mentioned earlier, customers must be on the subscription or Sage 300cloud model.
As a further incentive for customers to adopt Sage 300cloud, Sage is providing some of these connected applications at no extra cost for certain subscription levels thereby making it more attractive and cost effective to choose that licensing option. And it may be only a matter of time where there is no option but subscription or Sage 300cloud.
Even though Sage 300cloud is an on premise offering, you may still opt to have it hosted in a private cloud by a hosting provider. There are many to choose from and the transition is fairly painless. The beauty of doing this is to take advantage of the many benefits that cloud computing has to offer, not the least of which is to offload your IT administration burden. No servers to buy and maintain.
That’s it in a nutshell. I hope that cleared things up rather than confuse the issue further. We’re always happy to have a discussion about it if that will be more helpful.