Just as everyone was getting excited at the prospect of the $50 billion mega-acquisition of Salesforce.com, Inc., it looks as if there wasn’t any interest in the company after all, and instead all of the excitement was generated by a boring old partnership its has just announced with the UK-based Sage Group plc.

Details of that partnership emerged on Tuesday evening, when the two companies announced what they’re calling a “broad global partnership” together with a new service from Sage designed to help small businesses move to the cloud. Called Sage Life, the new service is built on Salesforce1’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

For those who don’t know Sage, the company is a global supplier of financial software targeted at small and medium-sized enterprises. It’s a pretty enormous outfit too, with 13,000 employees across 23 countries according to Forbes‘ Ben Kepes, but despite that it’s been somewhat slow to embrace the cloud. That’s put the company in danger, as Kepes notes, for its rivals in the SMB accounting space Intuit Inc., and MYOB Corp., have both been much more prescient.

Maybe now things will change. Sage Life is a platform that’s designed to help small companies link data such as accounting, customer, finance and payroll info into a single systems that’s accessible anywhere, from any device. The service is optimized for mobile and social, and features a mobile control center from where employees can view data in real-time, or connect with colleagues, customers, partners, suppliers and other stakeholders.

“We’ve invested over a long period of time in our most significant development effort ever to build a platform to help our customers build applications,” said Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff. “Salesforce1 is now in the hands of hundreds of thousands of users, and today is by far the most exciting day ever for our platform, and for small businesses.”

“Today’s news reimagines the business of doing business for SMBs,” added Sage CEO Stephen Kelly. “What this does is give every employee real-time information on the Apple watch or the device of their choice. It’s as important to SMBs as the iPod was to consumers.”

Sage has a pretty big audience at which to market its new tools. The company said it will target the “15 million or so businesses around the world with between 10 and 200 employees” once Sage Life launches this summer. To entice customers further, Kelly said that a Sage app store would also be rolled out later this year.

So Sage at last gets hold of a customizable, mobile accessible and modern product, not to mention a healthy dose of credibility that comes from being friendly with Salesforce. But what does this news mean for the supposed Salesforce acquisition rumors?

“I can’t comment on the (merger and acquisition) rumors, of course, because that’s just the nature of M&A rumors,” was all Benioff would say on the matter.

But Denis Pombriant, managing principal at Beagle Research Group, was more forthcoming. The analyst told Computerworld that the partnership meant any takeover of Salesforce was unlikely.

“This is an announcement that’s been planned for months,” Pombriant said. “It sounds like a straight partnership and not much more. Someone could still be trying to buy Salesforce, but I sincerely doubt it, as I don’t think the company is buyable right now.”

Instead, Salesforce might decided to acquire Sage itself, or at least a portion of it. “I think Salesforce will take a minority position in Sage, in part as a goodwill gesture,” Pombriant told Enterprise Irregulars. “There was plenty of evidence if you knew where to look. Salesforce and Sage had made a joint announcement in the first quarter about Sage porting some of its accounting software to the Salesforce1 platform and becoming a member of the Salesforce ecosystem. The existence of the press conference, being billed as a fireside chat, and the general plan, has also been known for two weeks.”

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