Midmarket ERP Battle Heats Up

Microsoft released its latest promised entry, Dynamics AX 4.0, while SAP said it has 10,000 customers for its Business One midmarket ERP software lineup.

Microsoft's Dynamics products--Axapta, Great Plains, Solomon and Navision--are relying on tighter integration with the Microsoft software stack as their ace in the hole. ERP leader SAP, meanwhile, is betting that companies running SAP All in One at headquarters will want Business One in regional divisions or subsidiaries.

On Wednesday, SAP America unveiled new analytical and business intelligence capabilities developed by ISV partners for Business One. Partners SoftBrands, PARIS Technologies and Third Wave Business Systems are adding advanced internal reporting for the ERP line.

Clearly, the ERP players are battling for the spokes on the so-called hub-and-spoke model.

Solution providers say they are ready to capitalize on feature improvements to Dynamics AX 4.0, which is shipping now. Sandeep Walia, CEO of Los Angeles-based Ignify, cited improved table indexing, Unicode support, better record keying and tighter SharePoint integration as key improvements.

"Axapta 3.0 had missing indexes on tables, and performance got to be a drag on the large tables. Dynamics AX has changed that with indexes across all the tables," he said.

Walia also lauded an updated business connector, now supporting .Net, that will better handle high-volume transactions. Ignify's eCommerce platform for building online storefronts already supports the Dynamics AX release.

Simon Chan, president of Iteration2, an Irvine, Calif.-based solution provider, said that with Dynamics AX, Axapta's interface has been pulled deeper into the Microsoft stack. "[It's] very much like Microsoft Outlook with the menu bar on the side and the hierarchical folder structure. That's where the similarity starts, but is also very apparent with the rest of the product as you use it," he said.

Outlook integration continues to be a competitive point for many business software products, whether from Microsoft or not. Chan also noted the addition of a new Service Management module that ties into Iteration2's field-service offering.

In addition, many partners cited Microsoft's role-based approach with the software. The Redmond, Wash., company has designated some 60 business roles or personas--from payroll clerks and order processing staff to IT personnel--and the tasks that appear on the sidebar depend on the role assigned to a given user. These roles will show up across the ERP product lines.

The work model is a hierarchical set of descriptions of typical jobs. The tasks may be different for each job, but the interface is familiar to people, said Darren Laybourn, general manager of the Dynamics Tools Group at Microsoft, told Tech Ed 2006 attendees in Boston this week.

"It will look familiar to people. You stay in Outlook. We've basically integrated Outlook into sales, marketing and other processes and host them inside Outlook," Laybourn said.