In March 2008, I called ERP a poor second cousin at Microsoft (MSFT). On July 27 I wrote that Oracle (ORCL) should consider selling the remnants of the J.D. Edwards business to Golden Gate/Infor because the loyal IBM AS/400 (System/36, System/3, etc. working backwards) users probably don't want to "fuse" anytime soon. And sooner or later the old-ERP-product maintenance revenue stream game is going to become counterproductive for Oracle in terms of both bad PR as well as acutal revenue. Sitting in on the Microsoft financial analysts' meeting on the morning of July 30, I reached the same conclusion in terms of what Microsoft should do with the former Damgaard, Great Plains, Navision and Solomon businesses. Steve Ballmer does not even think of these applications as one of his seven key businesses. ERP is not even a second cousin anymore. Instead Dynamics (which is really the four products listed above plus a CRM SaaS offering) is just an "enabler" of Microsoft's "enterprise infrastructure" business (that is, the Server and Tools division--STD). Steve Ballmer didn't explain why Dynamics is bolted onto the side of Office division instead of STD if that's the case. But either way, it is clear that Microsoft is not serious about the classic packaged enterprise applications space. And I understand why: don't compete with your partners. ERP is starting to give way in importance to business process management (BPM), not that ERP is going to disappear but BPM delivers many of the benefits ERP promised 15 years ago but was unable to deliver. Steve, take Microsoft ERP out of its third cousin status in Redmond. Sell it to Infor.
-- Dennis Byron
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