Comments from Soren Janstal

BREAKING NEWS – MICROSOFT BUYS NAVISION

See article in Financial Times.

I was surprised at the end of 2000, when Microsoft bought Great Plains. What they got were 2 mature systems, Solomon and Dynamics. Solomon is targeting the “low end” segment. No vendor has before succeeded to reach a global market in this segment. Can Microsoft succeed? Hardly not. Local adaptations seem to be too expensive in these low cost systems. OK, Dynamics then? Dynamics competes in the middle market. This market is characterized as intensive in consulting. So far Microsoft is not famous for tailoring their solutions. And the competition is intensive even without Microsoft. What we have seen so far is co-operations with partners like e-procurement solutions together with Clarus.

What can Navision contribute? Navision Attain has similar clients as Solomon. So that cannot be the main target. But Navision Axapta is the state of the art in technical architecture. Axapta still lacks a lot in functionality. But Axapta can become the proof of concept for Microsoft .NET platform. That’s important.

It is financially interesting that Microsoft spends more than 2,2 billion dollars in ERP systems. You could get half of Volvo Car company for that amount. Ford spent 5 billion dollars on that. So this is big spending!

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Regards
Sören Janstål