Tuesday, March 29, 2005

The Microsoft ERP lock in effect

Earlier this month, Microsoft laid out its roadmap for Project Green, its next generation ERP offerings. But one aspect that has not been fully discussed is how Microsoft will be locking in customers of its ERP systems to its own technology stack.

Although Microsoft's Project Green will provide an improved user interface, better interoperability via Web services, and new features for business intelligence, it will do so by tying the ERP system more tightly to several Microsoft infrastructure products, such as Microsoft's SharePoint portal, Exchange, Outlook, SQL Server, and SQL Reporting Services. This is great, if those products are part of your infrastructure strategy. If not, it pretty much guarantees they will be, or else you will miss out on the improvements of Project Green.

To be fair, Microsoft's strategy to lock in ERP customers to its own infrastructure technologies is not much different than Oracle's, which has made it clear that it intends over the long term to move its newly acquired PeopleSoft and JDE customers to Oracle's database and middleware. The big difference between Oracle and Microsoft, however, is that Microsoft plays in so many levels of the technology stack, including server and desktop operating systems.

VNUnet.com has more.

Related posts
Microsoft: Project Green to appear in waves
Microsoft fuzzes up the definition of Project Green

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