The Role of Great Plains at Microsoft

A series of recent organizational and product announcements have clarified how Microsoft will integrate Great Plains, the business management software company it acquired in Dec. 2000. Great Plains will provide new ammunition to compete against solutions-oriented competitors, such as IBM and Oracle, in the market for mid-sized businesses (and eventually enterprises), help the company sell bCentral hosted services to businesses of all sizes (not just the small businesses on which bCentral is currently focused), and push new Microsoft technologies, such as .NET, into the marketplace. Microsoft’s plans for Great Plains place it in competition with application service providers (ASPs) and business management ISVs, but will create new opportunities for resellers and vertical ISVs.

Great Plains Products and Channels

To understand where Great Plains fits into Microsoft’s future, it is necessary to understand what Microsoft got when it bought the company.

Great Plains offers accounting, finance, human resources (HR), and business management software for mid-sized businesses. Great Plains’ high-end product line, eEnterprise, is designed for larger organizations with 100 to 5,000 employees and US$50 million to US$250 million in annual revenues, and it competes against enterprise business solutions from Epicor, J.D. Edwards, Lawson, and Oracle. The Dynamics product line, based on the same code base as eEnterprise, is geared toward businesses with 25 to 500 employees and competes against solutions from Epicor and Sage. In 1999, Great Plains acquired Solomon Software to fill certain gaps in the Dynamics product line. Although Solomon is also intended for businesses of 25 to 500 employees, Great Plains has no plans to merge Solomon and Dynamics, according to Great Plains Director Mitch Ruud.