It would be hard for competitors not to notice that SAP and Oracle are ratcheting up their focus on the small- and medium-sized enterprise market. All they have to do is walk through any major metropolitan airport where billboard ads touting the large vendors' devotion to the SME space are plastered across every terminal.
Still, despite the high-profile SME marketing campaigns of SAP and Oracle, many enterprise applications vendors that have long targeted small- and medium-sized manufacturers — providers such as CDC Software, Epicor, Glovia, IFS, Infor, IQMS, Lawson, and Microsoft — seem to be doing just fine. That's, at least in part, because many of these smaller vendors have managed to carve out niches for themselves in manufacturing industries by adding deep vertical-specific functionality to their products.
"SAP and Oracle, so far, haven't posed that much of a threat to the Infors and Epicors of the world, because those vendors have done a good job of building best-of-breed, industry-specific stuff into their products and establishing themselves in given verticals," says Ray Wang, an analyst at Forrester Research. "If you are an auto parts supplier, Glovia has the best functionality. If you are in life sciences and you need to conform to CFR Part 11 [regulations], IFS has really good products."
A good example of a smaller SME-focused vendor successfully pursuing a vertical strategy is CDC Software, whose Ross Enterprise suite targets process manufacturers in the food, specialty chemicals, and biotechnology industries. Ross Enterprise includes formula-based production control and product-costing features that let process manufacturers go beyond standard costing approaches supported in many more-horizontal application suites, says Scot McLeod, the company's senior marketing vice president.