From: Adam Rifkin (adam@KnowNow.com)
Date: Sat Dec 23 2000 - 16:25:44 PST
I wonder if MSFT thought the name of the company was "Great Plans"? :)
> "This is the first fundamentally new business we've entered since
> 1995," says David Vaskevitch, Microsoft's senior VP for business
> applications. "A year ago, it became clear that we needed another new
> growth business. I proposed that we get into the business applications
> space," he said. "This is a huge new market."
I love this man. There was a great paper he wrote 5 or 6 years ago that
I still think about sometimes.
> Davis expects Microsoft to make more acquisitions to meet its goal to
> build a full suite of business process apps.
I wonder if they'd consider buying companies started by ex-employees?
Adam
> December 21, 2000, 4:20 PM PST
> Microsoft Sees Great Plains as the New Frontier
> Redmond ventures into the vast business-applications market with its
> $1.1 billion acquisition of the software maker.
>
> By Dominic Gates
>
> The great software octopus that is Microsoft (MSFT) just got bigger.
> With the acquisition of Great Plains in a $1.1 billion stock swap,
> announced Thursday morning, the Redmond giant is spreading its tentacles
> into a new market, reaching for a whole new set of customers.
>
> With this deal, Microsoft is moving to create and market a suite of
> applications to help companies run their businesses that may eventually
> rival its Office suite of applications for end-users.
>
> "This is the first fundamentally new business we've entered since 1995,"
> says David Vaskevitch, Microsoft's senior VP for business
> applications. "A year ago, it became clear that we needed another new
> growth business. I proposed that we get into the business applications
> space," he said. "This is a huge new market."
>
> In the business market, until now, Microsoft has only sold applications
> for end-users (pre-eminently the Office suite of what is termed
> "productivity apps") and infrastructure software (the Windows platform,
> including enterprise servers). It has not sold the sort of applications
> that run a business in the background, so-called business processes
> apps: typically software packages that automate accounting, customer
> relationship management, e-commerce, financial management, human
> resources, inventory, report writing, supply chain, travel expenses and
> so on.
>
> But now Microsoft says it plans to sell these types of applications with
> its acquisition of Fargo, N.D.-based Great Plains, which specializes in
> accounting, financial management and other software for the medium-size
> business market. This will move Microsoft from creating applications for
> personal financial services for individuals - Microsoft Money and MSN
> MoneyCentral - to developing software packages that can easily run a
> 300-person company's accounting department. In a conference call, Jeff
> Raikes, a Microsoft group VP, emphasized that financial software is only
> the beginning for Microsoft.
>
> Great Plains has recently expanded its product line to include
> human-resources and customer-management software. Raikes compared the
> mission of the new Great Plains division of Microsoft to the integration
> of word processing, spreadsheet and other separate applications into the
> massively successful Office suite, a product Raikes helped drive to
> market in the late 1980s.
>
> "[Great Plains CEO] Doug [Burgum] and his team, and Microsoft,
> understand the importance of making individual business processes
> applications into more than a suite, more a seamless application,"
> Raikes says.
>
> "We're committed to building a suite [of business processes apps],"
> Vaskevitch says. "There's even more potential for integration than in
> [Office]. Customers want an integrated software package that does it all."
>
> In that statement many will hear an echo of Larry Ellison, CEO of rival
> Oracle. Ellison has been promoting Oracle's suite of business services
> with precisely that line, in opposition to Microsoft's strategy, which
> was to sell business customers a platform and let them choose "best of
> breed" solutions from among the many different applications
> available. We may now hear that argument less from Microsoft.
>
> Burgum's role and title underscore Great Plains' significance to
> Microsoft: He'll immediately join Microsoft's elite Business Leadership
> Team with the title of senior VP. With Burgum still at the helm, Great
> Plains becomes a new division of Microsoft, operating out of North Dakota.
>
> Great Plains has been in business for 19 years; with recent acquisitions
> of its own, it's grown to some 2,000 employees. It reports revenues of
> $300 million a year and with its extensive web of local channel partners
> - some 10,000 people - it generates perhaps $1 billion worth of activity
> in the medium-size business market.
>
> Both Vaskevitch and Raikes separately spoke about how Microsoft will
> integrate Great Plains' software with its bCentral division, which
> caters to smaller businesses. The plan also will allow the extension of
> the bCentral ASP or "software as a service" model to include the Great
> Plains software.
>
> Vaskevitch foresees a time when businesses will have a mix of Microsoft
> software automating their operations, some of it hosted by an ASP
> (including Microsoft) and some of it loaded on-premises. He says that
> Microsoft will retain the Great Plains channel partners, and that they
> will have increased opportunities to offer add-on services.
>
> Dwight Davis, an analyst with Summit Strategies, doesn't entirely agree
> with this vision.
>
> "This is a real sea change for Microsoft," says Davis, who sees the move
> as Redmond reneging on promises to keep its hands off of certain
> industry segments. Davis believes that the news will discomfit not only
> competitors of Great Plains, but also many Microsoft partners.
>
> Davis expects Microsoft to make more acquisitions to meet its goal to
> build a full suite of business process apps. He also thinks that
> Microsoft may gradually shift into supplying apps for the large
> enterprise space, perhaps eventually competing directly with Oracle in
> this market as well as in the database market.
>
> As for Great Plains: it used to be a big fish in this market; now it's a
> tentacle of the giant octopus.
>
> The two companies have been close for years. In 1997, in a prologue to
> the federal antitrust case, Burgum testified on Microsoft's behalf
> before Sen. Orrin Hatch's Senate judiciary committee. Burgum spoke about
> how the software industry worked and of the importance of independent
> solution providers like Great Plains.
>
> Independent no more, late last night Burgum's board unanimously approved
> the takeover. They had chosen, he said, to structure the deal on a stock
> basis, rather than cash basis, to indicate that he and his company "are
> buying in, not selling out."
---- Adam@KnowNow.ComNeo: That was you on my computer. How did you do that?
Trinity: Right now, all I can tell you is that you're in danger. I brought you here to warn you.
Neo: About what?
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Neo: Who is?
Trinity: Please just listen. I know why you're here, Neo. I know what you've been doing... why you hardly sleep, why you live alone, and why night after night, you sit by your computer. You're looking for him. I know because I was once looking fo r the same thing. And when he found me, he told me I wasn't really looking for him. I was looking for an answer. It's the question that drives us. It's the question that brought you here. You know the question, just as I did.
Neo: What is the Matrix?
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-- The Matrix
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