If you want to see an ex-SAP person's perspective on the possible future or demise of the ERP industry, have a look at Jeff Nolan's blog on the future of the software industry. Depending on where you are as a vendor or reseller, adn what you strategy is, you may find this appealing or appalling.

Note: interesting to me is that Jeff mentions that vendors not likely to have an answer are SAP, Oracle and IBM; I wonder why he didn't mention Microsoft ... or does he have a reason to leave them out?

I have to take some of my criticism of Microsoft Dynamics marketers back. They are not completely out of touch.

Why? Because they have changed the brochure that first made me say they are fools. I'm glad they realised the mistake. You don't think they read this blog, do you?

Also, they have informed us that as of 1st October there are changes to the new licencing structure that reduces the price per user fairly substantially, and adds functionality to the lower end edition, which makes that edition more useful and acceptable.

Does it show that Microsoft are beginning to understand the nature of the ERP market? I'm not sure yet, but during a presentation recently to a prospect, at which a Microsoft representative was present, the Microsoft reps comments about Microsoft being prepared to be price competitive with other ERP packages prompted one of the prospect representatives to say to me afterwards "It's interesting to see how Microsoft acts when it doesn't own the market."

I think the Dynamics people in Microsoft are quite aware they are in a competitive environment, especially those in the field, but unfortunetly I think too many of the main decision makers have not come from the field and are still naive about the situation.

If it happened once I could be less critical, but in the last few weeks I have had at least 3 contacts with companies that were reviewing an ERP solution and had only looked at SAP Business One. When asked if they had considered Microsoft, a common comment was "we didn't know Microsoft had a comparable solution".

It seems that MS Dynamics is still labouring under the illusion that because everyone knows about 'Microsoft' they don't have to aggressively market their products. That is definitely my perception about the situation in SA.

What would be a solution - stop hiring people with consumer marketing credentials for MS Dynamics, and go for people with business-to-business marketing experience.

If you operate in the business software market, you should subscribe to the free weekly email from AMR Research entitled "First Thing Monday". But this week there was a sign that they don't communicate too well between analysts.

In an article about Oracle, one analyst commented how CIOs are getting "nervous about buying from smaller technology providers. Many organizations have begun to embrace the idea of standardizing on a few very large software vendors that can offer comprehensive product portfolios, global coverage, and financial stability."

In a different article, another analyst comments how a smaller vendor is beating the majors like SAP because of its "industries focus and messaging on fast time to value. Logility has learned lessons from its competitors by focusing on its core value proposition."

So guys, which is it?