MICROSOFT GREAT PLAINS is poised to roll out its ERP (enterprise resource planning) software for Microsoft's .NET Web services infrastructure in a move to challenge the biggest ERP players in the lucrative middle-tier market.

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Great Plains, acquired by Microsoft in April, is building a .NET business applications platform that it will use to develop .NET versions of its accounting, finance, supply-chain management, CRM (customer relationship management), and human resources applications.

Slated to debut in the fall, the first .NET application, called BusinessDesk, will be a thin-client, browser-based user-interface portal for employee or customer self-service access to finance and accounting applications, said Dave Coulombe, vice president of corporate strategy at Microsoft Great Plains, based in Fargo, N.D.

"[Great Plains] could be a major threat to the major ERP companies," said David Dobrin, president of B2B Analysts in Cambridge, Mass. ".NET gives [Great Plains] a technical edge in the underlying structure of its applications that, to some extent, is analogous to client/server. People aren't interested in great big baggy application systems. They prefer simplicity."

BusinessDesk will allow light corporate users to customize different tabs to include relevant information on their company and from the Internet, such as competitive information or stock quotes. "[Users] want the capability of all the drill-downs, ... all the user-interface icons," Coulombe said. "Browsers ... don't typically have that interface."

ERP heavyweights Oracle and SAP have successfully come down to the midmarket, which has traditionally been Great Plains' territory, said David Monroe, an analyst at Plant-Wide Research, in North Billerica, Mass.

As for the actual number of customers, however, Great Plains has a much larger installed client base, than have Oracle and SAP, especially of general-purpose applications in the manufacturing sector, Monroe said.

"That general-purpose business market will adopt this new direction Great Plains is going for," Monroe said. "This market is spending more money for software applications than it used to" because of persistent demand for the basic business functions of ERP, he added.

Oracle made some moves of its own into the midmarket and small business arena this week when it extended its software-as-a-service model, which promotes hosting, to include Oracle Small Business Suite, targeted at small and midsize companies with less than $100 million in revenue.

The Redwood Shores, Calif.-based company partnered with NetLedger, based in San Mateo, Calif., to offer financial, call-center, and purchasing services.

Calling the shift a wholesale transformation of the software business, Oracle.com president Tim Chou said that Oracle will host the software and take care of managing, tuning, backing up, restoring, and upgrading the applications and hardware. Users will also have the option of deploying applications at their own sites, and Oracle will certify and manage them.