It's Official: Microsoft ERP's For The Big Boys

Out loud. And in public.

The company is no longer aiming its ERP and CRM products at SMBs and departments/divisions of big enterprises. The Big M is taking on big business software.

Tami Reller, corporate vice president of Microsoft Business Division announced the news Saturday to partners at the ramp up to Convergence 2007 in San Diego. And Simon Witt, the enterprise sales and partner poobah was on hand to second her motion.

"We're changing the positioning of Dynamics. Now it's for all customers and that's an important statement," said Craig McCollum, VP of Worldwide Sales Strategy Microsoft Business Solutions said Monday afternoon.

Normally, this positioning stuff—since Microsoft does it so often-- doesn't matter much, but in this case it's worth listening to what Microsoft said.

To parse it out a bit, when Microsoft bought Great Plains five years ago it was careful to talk about that company's accounting—oops make that ERP—products in the SMB context. Secondarily, it also targeted divisions and departments of larger enterprises. This made it easier for Microsoft to continue fruitful partnerships with SAP and, later in the CRM realm, with Siebel Systems.

After Navision came into the fold and more especially in the last few years, Microsoft turned up the enterprise heat a bit, talking more about how its ERP products were a good fit for some larger companies.

Last year MBS senior vice president Doug Burgum told CRN that a good 40 percent of the company's second half CRM revenue came from enterprise accounts, for example. And there appeared to be solid interest among global systems integrators in Microsoft ERP and CRM.

Last October, Peter Boit then newly promoted to vice president of enterprise partners, said the company was ramping up its business solutions push to large customers.

A few months earlier, Microsoft COO Kevin Turner told partners that he did not enjoy writing out big checks to Oracle for Microsoft's internal Siebel implementations and that he wanted Microsoft to expedite its own internal move off of Siebel and onto Microsoft CRM.. Since Turner joined Microsoft after years at Sam's Club and Wal-Mart, his words carry credibility with enterprise customers.

This is interesting positioning especially given the competitive situation. ERP kingpins SAP and Oracle are trying to come down market from big enterprise accounts into Microsoft's wheelhouse. At the same time, SaaS lead Salesforce.com is expanding beyond hosted CRM into enterprise applications areas and a development platform for ISV and other partners. NetSuite is also expanding its hosting infrastructure beyond its business apps suite. There's a whole lotta shaking going on here.

Of course some caveats remain for Microsoft.. "We're no longer saying we're limited to departments of the enterprise. We no longer want to say we're only for SMBsWe're not limiting ourselves. We'll sell everywhere in the right scenario," McCollum said.

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