Call It What You Want, It's Still Opportunity

No sooner has the industry nearly agreed on a definition than some marketing guy coins a new term, often when the old one would do just fine. Worse yet is the stretching of the latest buzzwords into meaningless generalities.

If it drives journalists a little nuts, all this fuzzy language has to drive precision-minded engineers batty.

But you can't really blame the marketing guys, not always. Technology and the way it is applied is constantly changing, and the language has to change with it. The trusty dog-eared Webster's dictionary is no match for Google when it comes to assessing common usage. Our cover story this week struggles with a whopping big and fuzzy term, Enterprise Resource Planning, better known as ERP, which once meant something very specific in the manufacturing sector. But the term is certainly being stretched these days to cover any number of applications that can share data across any number of business processes.

Who's to blame? The culprit may be the evolution of the market. Small businesses are adopting more robust infrastructures and wanting to connect the dots in their organizations, as Alex Zaltsman of Exigent Technologies puts it in this month's Channel Perspectives column. Applications such as accounting, CRM and document management are being connected and, like e-mail, they are becoming part of the infrastructure of even many small businesses. So we need a good term for that, and ERP seems to do the job.

You can argue about the semantics, but the meaning for solution providers is clear: Maybe it's time to consider an ERP practice. It's no longer just an accounting VAR's market. Microsoft, for one, seems to understand that. Pieces of the application layer are moving into the infrastructure, and infrastructure integrators are moving "up the stack."

Small business is another term that often gets stretched. Small businesses are often defined as companies with fewer than 100 employees or, alternatively, as companies with less than $100 million in sales. If you have $1 million in sales for every employee—a distributor might—then the definitions jibe. For service businesses, not so much. But clearly ERP is scaling down and small businesses are bulking up, and the point where the two meet is the sweet spot of early adoption in the ERP market. ERP may be a moving target, but it is moving in one clear direction, down-market. And that down-market movement, of course, is what has been feeding the solution provider channel with new opportunities since the beginning.

Where is the sweet spot for erp applications? CRNTech welcomes letters and feedback. send your comments to Executive Editor John Longwell at [email protected].