Connecting the Enterprise

Selecting an enterprise suite is a little like choosing between an exotic sports car and a mid-priced sedan, according to research published by Gartner (www.gartner.com). Those with budget and IT resources to choose the sports car will take advantage of the added horsepower of a high-end driving machine, i.e. competitive performance and deep functionality. Most CG companies, however, keep IT budgets on a tight leash these days and are more than willing to trade down to a lower-cost, lower-maintenance solution that still does the job.

This represents a change from a few years ago dominated by free-spending early adopters, according to Gartner. Today's CG firms are looking for simpler, less-expensive, easier-to- implement solutions. They still want rich functionality that delivers competitive differentiation, but their top priorities are ease of use and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). They still want a scalable vision of the future to handle collaborative synchronization and global requirements, but they also want the enterprise technology to perform well today with reliable support and service and, most importantly, ROI.

Delivering E-collaboration

Delivering these requirements for the second year in a row is SAP (www.sap.com), our Best of Breed winner for 2003 in the enterprise suites category. SAP's core connectivity tool is the mySAP.com e-business platform, which extends the reach of technology throughout the enterprise. This network architecture for cross-enterprise applications fulfills the promise of e-collaboration and provides interoperability with such other systems as Microsoft .NET and IBM WebSphere.

CG companies are frequently encouraged to match their requirements with vendor capabilities, but that is unnecessary with application-rich SAP, which offers a full-line of modules ranging from supply chain to planning to optimization to CRM to product lifecyle to financials and many more. In addition, SAP works hard to deliver solutions tailored to specific verticals, such as a new Direct Store Delivery (DSD) solution for the beverage industry.

Appropriately for a Best of Breed winner, SAP recently signed golf great Ernie Els to a multi-year contract. The British and U.S. Open winner will wear the SAP logo on his headgear and golf apparel further improving the firm's survey-leading recognition factor rating.

From Concept to Reality

Nailing down second in the enterprise-suite category is Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) while the Microsoft Great Plains business solutions division appears in the sixth slot. This impressive showing is probably the result of growing maturity in two pivotal areas: 1. Microsoft.NET connected software, which moved from concept to reality over the course of the year; and 2. Full integration of Great Plains technology (following purchase by Microsoft in 2001) into the .NET vision of a global enterprise.

Complementing Microsoft's ambitious .NET initiative is the recent beefing up of SQL Server 2000 to deliver data-management scalability to enterprises of all sizes.

No doubt this further cements the appeal to CG companies to become a Microsoft shop top-to-bottom and take advantage of cost and effort reductions.

Microsoft Great Plains had a busy year as well, highlighted by the release of eEnterprise 7.0, which provides a collaborative environment for information management and an application-rich suite of integrated e-business solutions.

Continuing to rely on deep optimization to serve its CG customers, J.D. Edwards (www.jde.com) is also taking steps to beef up its vision of demand- and supply-chain collaboration. Last year, the company released J.D. Edwards 5, a suite of collaboration enterprise solutions that augment current functionality, and, for its efforts, readers voted it into the number three slot.

Crossing Boundaries

Touting its Web-based archtecture, PeopleSoft (www.peoplesoft.com) continues to add deeper functionality to its enterprise suite and gets rewarded for its efforts by moving up from the number six slot in 2002 to number four in 2003. It's most recent release, PeopleSoft 8.8 Enterprise Performance Management, is "an emerging superset of applications and processes that cross the traditional department boundaries to manage the full life cycle of business decision-making," notes John Hagerty in the AMR Research (www.amrresearch.com) report, "Take Control of Your Business With EPM," which was published August 2002.

Perhaps the firm to watch in this category is Manugistics (www. manu.com), which comes in at number seven overall, but leads the field in the customer experience rating. Manugistics has gained in enterprise mind share over the past year and has continued to broaden its functionality. Its integration architecture continues to enable more-rapid implementations and lower TCO than some of the other vendors, according to Gartner. Manugistics' purchase of STG has served it well in complex, assemble-to-order environments, and it has begun to integrate its disparate manufacturing modules in a way that promises to address a broad set of CG verticals.

As the market matures, enterprises are looking for more-integrated, simpler-to-deploy tools, and will no longer tolerate complex solutions that require a high degree of customization.