Competing Against NetSuite - Inside Microsoft Dynamics GP

Jay Manley talks about Competing Against NetSuite and the confusion they spread around the Cloud. According to a Slashdot story that popped up right after I saw Jay's post, 51% people in a recent survey thought that stormy weather interferes with cloud computing.

Clearly we all have a lot of work to do.

[To pontificate briefly, accounting is accounting. we did it for 500 years on paper, by hand, apparently wearing little green eye shades. We can automate the rote pieces with computers just as engineers can automate calculations when designing a bridge and doctors no longer have to wait weeks for lab results. However, like Engineering and Medicine, Accounting remains a profession and no amount of automation (on premise, in the cloud or up someone's behind) can replace the judgment and expertise required to ensure proper control, accuracy, timeliness and usefulness of financial information. If anyone tell you differently, run. I've cleaned up too many messes created by someone playing accounting.]

73% Oracle customers upgrade to stay supported, no reported ROI | ZDNet

You can draw your own conclusions but I’m just sayin’ 73% Oracle customers upgrade to stay supported, no reported ROI

Sage re-branding: a risky endeavor | ZDNet

Dynamics competitor Sage is re-branding. ZDNet and others have coverage. In short, they are dropping product names for the 40 odd products they’ve acquired and are moving to numbers to try to build the overall Sage brand.

My take is:

• This doesn’t fix the inability of Sage customers to move up from one product to another without re-implementing. Every time someone has to re-implement the door opens for someone else to move in.
• Customers will be confused. We still see this with Dynamics after a lot of years and money spent on rebranding and it was a much smaller rebranding effort than what Sage is attempting.
• Customers won’t care. You can call it whatever you want but if it’s been MAS 90 for 10 years for a customer, it will be MAS 90 for the next 10 years unless of course it becomes Dynamics GP because they’re too focused on branding and not enough on delivering.
• The individual products have good brand awareness, Peachtree, MAS90, FAS, etc. I’m not sure that “Sage” does. They’ve got a lot of products to rebrand.
• This opens the door for FUD. I’m pretty confident that we wouldn’t do it but I could see someone telling prospects that Sage is killing the Peachtree that they love. Again, I’m not saying that it’s right, just that it will happen.

Paul Walker to step down at Sage

I try not to do too much competitive stuff because most of my readers care more about getting info out of Dynamics GP. But I felt that I did need to highlight that CEO Paul Walker to step down at Sage.

In typical form, AccMan has the scoop.

Microsoft Dynamics GP: Three Users for a Buck!

In a much better deal than anything McDonald’s or Wendy’s has to offer, Microsoft is offering the first three Advanced Management or Business Essentials users for a buck. This offer is for new customers and there are some restrictions. Visit Inside Microsoft Dynamics GP for links to the details.

Sage Developers: we suck...official.

In an unusually candid admission Sage developers admitted that at least one of their features pretty much sucks. Dennis Howlett has the specifics at AccManPro.

Dynamics ERP Edging Ahead

MSDynamicsWorld has a look at Panorama Consulting Group's newest survey showing that Microsoft Dynamics products have gain ground in the recession.

Microsoft Dynamics Customer Carousel

Via The Edge, Microsoft has a new site highlighting customer success stories at the Microsoft Dynamics Customer Carousel.

Sage's Largest Partner Closes the Books for Good

My last post on competition was back in March so I don't feel bad highlighting this. According to ChannelWeb, MIS Group, Sage's top business partner for the last two years has suddenly closed it's doors due to credit problems leaving it's Sage customers scrambling. Ouch! Dwight Specht has highlighted what resellers need to do to tighten the belt in this economy and it looks like MIS got caught in the credit crunch. It's a tough spot to be in so I'll avoid any gloating or snide comments. I've worked for companies near death and looked over the brink. It's never fun. Personally, I'm thrilled to be busy, billable and happy with the health of the company I work for.

[Hat Tip to Matthew Landis for this]

All Microsoft Dynamics Solutions Lead to the Future

Kiril Tatarinov, Microsoft Corporate VP of Microsoft Business Solutions and Mr. Dynamics to the rest of us has a new artcile up this week. It rah-rah but we all need a little rah-rah now and then. Sometime these types of communication worry me. I'm not feeling concerned about Microsoft's commitment to business solutions. If anything, what I see on twitter and blogs is that MS has moved solidly into the number 3 slot behind SAP and Oracle. Not a bad place to be considering that while there is some overlap, it's not the same market. But when Kiril feels the need to reassure me, I get nervous.

Personally, I'd rather see Kiril twitter than release well scrubbed reassurances. Authenticity and vulnerability provide an opportunity to get past the cyncism often directed at corporations as a whole. It's harder to hate a person than a company and it's really hard to hate a person once you really get to know them. If Kiril wants to break down walls and reach partners and customers we're going to need more frequent, smaller communications. Actually, that's not a bad idea for any of us.

Microsoft Dynamics Bang for the Buck

Over at Dynamics NAV site, Navigate into Success, Vjekoslav Babic takes a look at the results from Panorama Consulting Group's ERP Report. This study includes data from actual implementation results. The study is current, results are from 2008, and while it doesn't break out the various Dynamics products, the whole Microsoft Dynamics line fares extremely well.

Vjekoslav breaks out some hightlights so you don't have to read the whole thing if you don't want to. Among the golden nuggets:

• According to their findings, 72% of ERP customers chose SAP, Oracle or Microsoft’s solutions.
• Microsoft Dynamics ERP solutions (the report doesn’t break it down by specific product lines) are the 3rd most common, with 14% market share—as much as the combined market share of Baan, Epicor, IFS, Infor and Sage.
• Microsoft Dynamics solutions come with shortest average implementation duration of the Tier I vendors, and the lowest implementation cost of all ERP vendors. But saying “the lowest” doesn’t do Microsoft Dynamics right: “the lowest” means 6,5 times less than average SAP implementation costs, 4,9 times less than average Oracle implementation costs, and 3,25 times less than average implementation costs of all ERP solutions.
• Also, from cost perspective, implementing Microsoft Dynamics solutions proves to be the most predictable choice: quartile deviation of Microsoft Dynamics is 9% that of SAP, 11% that of Oracle, and 20% that of all ERP vendors.
• Microsoft Dynamics has employee satisfaction rate of 76,9%, the highest employee satisfaction rate of all ERP vendors, 12,5% higher than overall average for all ERP vendors.

Anyone else feeling warm and fuzzy now as Convergence approaches?

If you're a partner or project sponsor, go grab the full report. If you're wrestling with your Dynamics system, feel comfortable that you made the right choice. Call your partner and figure out how to make Dynamics work for you. If you're a consultant, you picked well, now go be the best consultant you can be. Finally, if you are happy with your Dynamics implementation, send a copy of the report to all of your friends who struggle with SAP or Oracle!

Epicor Struggling

I try not to post too much competitive stuff here and actually, no one has ever complained so I guess I'm doing ok with that. You might want to know that Dynamics GP competitor Epicor is struggling and has announced that it is working to cut costs (including jobs) to the tune of $16-20 million.

Make me glad I work with a Microsoft product. Nothing like mama having $20 billion in cash to make it easier to sleep at night.

Microsoft Dynamics - SAP and Oracle Should Worry

CIO magazine has an article and interview from 10/29/08 focused on Dynamics going head to head with Oracle and SAP. The interview is with Chris Caren, general manager of product management and marketing for Dynamics GP and ERP. We run into folks in organizations who prefer SAP, until they see the price tag. I've seen a number of clients in the 500 million to 1 billion annual revenue range and when they run the ROI numbers (not us), Dynamics GP beats SAP every time. Even a heavily customized version of GP wins.

[Hat Tip to the Merrit Matters blog for pointing this out]

Sage Kills Intelligent Reporting

Once in a very long while (my last sage piece was back in December 2007) I post a competitive piece. It was announced on Friday that Sage is killing it's Excel based reporting and BI tool named Intelligent Reporting. Ouch. One of the messages we're hearing coming out of Microsoft for Dynamics GP 11 is that it will have tighter ties to Office. Certainly what I'm seeing in the field is that BI with Excel is very popular because of it's familiarity.

Business Intelligence is exploding and killing a product like this is going to hurt Sage.

SSRS Performance and Scale

In his "Musings on Reporting and Notification Services" blog, Lukasz Pawlowski takes a look at a lessons learned technical note from the the SQL Server Customer Advisory team.
The team was comparing scaling up SQL Server Reporting Services 2005 vs 2008. The bottom line is that SSRS 2008 was able to respond to 3-4 times the total number of users and their requests on the same hardware.
So if you're facing performance issues with SSRS 2005 reporting with GP, help, in the form of SQL Server 2008, is on the way.

Rambling Madman likes GP

Paul at Ramblings of a Madman has some nice things to say about Dynamics GP.

New Ad Agency for Microsoft Dynamics

The folks who created "People ready business" are out and new agency JWT is in for advertising Microsoft's business solutions. I thought that People Ready Business was actually a pretty good campaign but one way or another I'm happy that MS is spending half a billion dollars on advertising to business customers.

Information Week and Microsoft BI

Information Week has an article on BI from the big guys, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft. Microsoft's BI and pricing strategy are pretty well explained and get a solid review. This is more of a macro article not specifically focused on GP but all the elements in here are being applied with respect to Performance Point, Excel and GP.

Dynamic Article at Accounting Web

There an article about Microsofts Dynamics ERP products up at Accounting Web. If you follow the ERP space you won't see much new but it was an interesting read none the less.

How Much SAP Software Can a $100 million Buy?

It's been 3 months since I hightlighted competitor issues and 6 months since I picked on SAP so yesterday's (non-April fools) story that Waste Management is suing SAP in Texas for a $100 million was very timely. The crux of the suit seems to be the sales process. Waste Management claims SAP fraudulently claimed that their industry standard waste management solution didn't require any customization but that the software they delivered was untested and buggy. I find it interesting that it's a fraud claim.

If someone actually said that the software wouldn't require any customization, they should shoot the saleperson. Every business is similar to every other business except in the ways that they are different. There is really no one size fits all solution at any level and certainly not given the size of Waste Management. The bottom line is, you don't know until you get in there. Perhaps someone doesn't "need" customization but a customization can provide significant operational benefits. That clouds the definition of need.

There are lessons here for the GP world as well. Perhaps not, $100 million lessons (I hope not!) but in an implementation, the consultant has a burden to try to understand the client's business and provide the best solution possible. The client needs to own the ultimate outcome and be willing to make smart ROI decisions around what it's "needs" really are.