Great Plains 7.5 Combines Products

Great Plains Dynamics and eEnterprise, Microsoft’s accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for small and mid-size businesses respectively, have been re-branded as a single product, Great Plains 7.5. Bundling all Great Plains (GP) features into one product could improve flexibility for customers by allowing them to add capacity and functionality incrementally, rather than by upgrading from Dynamics to the significantly more expensive eEnterprise line.

Microsoft will, however, continue to offer a lower-cost edition of GP, labeled GP Standard (previously called GP Select). GP Standard will use the Microsoft SQL Desktop Engine (MSDE) instead of SQL Server. Although this is a good option for small companies looking for ERP capabilities, scalability limitations in MSDE may require those companies to move to GP 7.5 as they grow.

GP 7.5 also adds several new features to help customers manage their supply chains and improve data analysis and reporting, and continues Microsoft’s push into the mid-sized business systems market, started with the company’s acquisition of GP in 2001. Microsoft views this market as both potentially lucrative and a beachhead against big business competitors like IBM and Oracle who are beginning to target mid-size businesses more aggressively. Tapping this market will also drive demand for Microsoft’s core platform (particularly Windows Server and SQL Server) and possibly other products, such as Office 2003, as integration with those products and GP improves.