bCentral Drops Finance, Site Building Offerings

bCentral is eliminating its hosted financial management and Web-site creation offerings and will encourage customers to turn to Microsoft’s Great Plains and FrontPage products for these functions. The move indicates that Microsoft is repositioning bCentral as a complement to its traditional software business, rather than as an all-in-one, small business e-commerce solution based on the application service provider (ASP) model. The company did not disclose how many small businesses will be affected.

Hosted Finance Solutions Not Trusted

By the end of Nov. 2001, bCentral will phase out Finance Manager, the accounting and financial management solution hosted online at bCentral. The businesses that paid US$30 a month to use Finance Manager will be encouraged to upgrade to Great Plains Small Business Manager (SBM), a packaged client-server accounting solution based on Great Plains’ eEnterprise and Dynamics code base. SBM offers many more features than Finance Manager, but has a heftier one-time price tag of US$1,500 or more. bCentral does plan to offer SBM or some subset of SBM on a hosted basis, although pricing and details have not been announced.