Microsoft Moves to Small Business Accounting / Retail Market - Stakes and Thoughts

In this small article we will deal with new opportunities for Microsoft Small Business Server specialists, but rather look at the overall business strategy and possible future ERP modules standardizing and interoperability. This is important to enter into consideration for midsize and large corporate business IT decision makers. We see the history and possible future development.

or Great Plains Software acquisition. When Microsoft took leading position on the operating system market and released stable and reliable Windows 2000 Server, the next logical step would be to enter the ERP market. Microsoft has decided to test the market average, and the reason is probably this - it's good to create small accounting as an extension of Microsoft Office, not to purchase existing small application. However if you plan to try midmarket - you better buy something with a large established customer base. The development of medium-sized package from scratch could exhaust all the resources. How to Bet on the Great Plains was high - Microsoft formed business systems subdivision - Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains, Great Plains as a result of name has been removed and now we see Microsoft Business Solutions.

Navision or acquisition software. There are different opinions among the MBS partners. Considering the fact that Navision Attain had strong clientele in Europe, and the fact that currently MBS promotes Navision on the majority of emerging markets: Eastern Europe, Russia, Brazil - the point of view that Microsoft has made huge pool of customers in Europe and one of the goals of Navision acquisition was geographic expansion.

or Axapta. Navision Software was really strong and was a Danish software "dragons" (in the good sense of the word), the other company was good MacHanza. We would like here to credit Danish ERP vendors. Axapta was new product on the time of acquisition and is feature rich ERP and so - a rival SAP, Oracle Financials, PeopleSoft

Manager or Small Business / Small Business Financials. This was the natural way of resizing functionality of Great Plains Dynamics / Microsoft Great Plains to get small business market. Small Business Financials is Great Plains Dexterity written accounting package. You see similar marketing moves from SAP and Oracle share more.

or Small Business Accounting 2006. It took Microsoft about four years to feel comfortable on the ERP market, first decided to create their own small business package, designed to measure the market share from QuickBooks, MYOB, Peachtree. Small Business Accounting 2006 is a really nice, which is well integrated with Microsoft Office / Microsoft Outlook. Microsoft is right - the majority of Windows users spend their time on the computer in Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Excel. And creating accounting applications, allowing you to make 50% of jobs directly from Microsoft Outlook

or Microsoft POS. As you know there are thousands of small retail businesses in the United States, using a cash register, and these people need to use a lot of small retail management applications, which compete in this market for a long time. And it is a good time to take over this turbulent market offering cheap and reliable and rock solid solution, working with POS processes. Please keep in mind that Microsoft has another high-end Retail Management System - Microsoft RMS, which can automate mid-size retail stores and huge chains.

Market or taking over? Well - the flint latest Microsoft Small Business Accounting and Microsoft POS give the customer the opportunity to stay in Microsoft framework from birth until the company to go public as a large corporation. This fact would be very difficult to ignore for those people out there on the market as BestSoftware, SAP, Oracle, Sun .......