The truth about Microsoft is out there

I've been ordered to make sense out of Microsoft's slew of mid-market, vertical, and back-office application announcements for an upcoming feature in InfoWorld. There have been a bunch of such announcements over the last few weeks, and to the casual eye, it may seem as though these tidbits are discrete and unrelated. But like the nutty FBI agent on X-Files, I think there's more. Looks to me as though much of this stuff is tied together by mysterious forces we've yet to uncover. Call them X-Releases.

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Now I can't tell you what I've found in this direction, mainly because I haven't started digging yet. (If you want the results, look for my feature on Oct. 3 -- if I live.) But I can tell you what I'd better find. After all, it's not like a lot of this stuff is new technology: Microsoft's been acquiring it, talking about it, or rehashing it for as many as four years in some cases. That's an eternity in the software business. What's Microsoft been doing in all those many moons? Let's take a little inventory.

First off, there's ERP. In 2002, Microsoft dropped $1.45 billion on Danish company Navision. These folks specialized in highly customizable "e-business" applications for the mid-market and had four basic products to their name: Axapta, Attain, C5, and XAL. You can still find Axapta on Microsoft's site under the imaginative name Microsoft Axapta. But the other three have gone missing, replaced with, simply, Microsoft Navision.

In case you're still wondering what these apps do, you're not alone. Bottom line: E-business apps attempt to be the Holy Grail of what ERP intended to accomplish. Namely, construct a cohesive and highly customizable framework that could be tailored to practically any business process or series of processes. Currently, Redmond has tweaked solutions for analytics, e-commerce, financial management, HR, manufacturing, supply chain management, and more, all within the Axapta/Navision solution set. Just what the word "solution" encompasses, I'm still figuring out.

Then there's accounting. Instead of developing accounting from the ground up, Microsoft purchased Solomon and Great Plains Software, both mid- to upper-market accounting players. They're currently both still disparate solutions, available separately. And now, they've been joined by a new, semi-home-grown product, Small Business Accounting 2006. Back in 2002, Redmond also purchased Sales Management Systems, a smaller California-based point-of-sale software maker. The descendent of this purchase is now available under the moniker Microsoft Retail Management System.

And that's just the acquired stuff. Next to that, the Business Solutions Redmondians have built some stuff on their own, including Microsoft Small Business Financials, CRM, Enterprise Reporting, Business Contact Manager, and Small Business Products. So, in four years, Microsoft must have constructed some kind of vision for all this technology. Given what the company has let us nerd newsers glimpse thus far, here's a little breakdown of what Redmond better be showing me in the coming week.

First, I expect to see Microsoft Office and SharePoint integration. This one's a gimme, as the company has already announced some of this for Small Business Accounting, and we've seen a bit of it with Business Contact Manager and even InfoPath. But, quite obviously, there's room for so much more. Enough, in fact, that the entire Office suite has the potential to simply act as a front-end client for a powerful library of back-end server systems. Similarly, Internet Explorer has the same potential with SharePoint, though the tools available in SharePoint could get a lot more muscle, given that they've been implemented on what amounts to a closed architecture.

Next is cohesion. Consolidate this stuff already. Why two separate mid-market accounting and ERP systems? And while you're at it, try and be clear on what ERP really is. Mid-market companies need clear definitions and workable (read price-conscious) implementation schedules. This VAR partner market is great, but what killed ERP in the first place were largely the rampant consulting charges that caused these projects to balloon until they popped. With such a large percentage of the world already using Windows and Office, Microsoft has a huge chunk of functionality already deployed. Now it should leverage that to make the ERP fantasy functionality come true for a reasonable price tag.

There some more stuff I'd like to see, like an ERP client for the Xbox, but I'm hedging my bets. Check my SMB IT blog for periodic updates and look for the complete picture in InfoWorld's Oct. 3 issue. Meantime, wish me luck and a gorgeous red-haired co-reporter.