Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Can't tell the players without a scorecard

So one good place to start might be with an inventory of dead (or extremely sleepy) ERP systems. I propose the following categories:
  1. Companies acquired, ERP product and customer base in limbo. This is the most common category. Examples: Baan, MANMAN.
  2. Company not actively investing in the product, future in question. Example: Qube.
  3. Company and/or product is just gone. Example: Flexware.
Under category #1, there are a couple of primary aggregator/offenders:
  • SSA (Baan, BPICS, MANMAN, MK, CAS, KBM, PRISM, many other products in ALL CAPS)
  • infor (formerly Agilisys), acquirers of MAPICS, Frontstep/Symix, Lilly VISUAL, BRAIN, NxTrend, daly.commerce, FACTS, SCT, etc.)
  • Oracle (JD Edwards, Peoplesoft, many more just outside the scope of our ERP study)
  • Microsoft (Great Plains, Navision)
  • Sage (MAS 90/200, ACCPAC, Peachtree, Platinum, BusinessWorks, BusinessVision, ACT!, SalesLogix, many more niche products)
  • Epicor (ROI Manage 2000, Scala, Avante, ManFact, DataFlo)
  • Exact (Alliance/Mfg, MAX, Macola, JobBoss)
I know there are lots and lots I'm leaving out. Comments, additions?

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog on the ever-shrinking world of Enterprise Resource Planning software vendors. In addition to maintaining an up-to-date "deathwatch" on ERP software at all levels of the marketplace, I'd like for this blog to be a resource for people looking for help once their company's mission-critical software has gone dark.

By way of full disclosure, my company offers an open source-based system called OpenMFG. The idea, whether you're a VAR or a corporate end-user, is that you don't have to worry about what happens to us as a company. You've got the source code, you've got a community of users and developers that know the product, and as such you've got security.

More to come shortly.