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by David R. Brousell, MA Editorial Staff
Posted on Sunday, February 25, 2007 3:00:00 AM Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox    | Abstract: | The SMB market, often characterized by limited IT resources, strict budgets, and less tolerance for lengthy implementations, lends itself well to SaaS service models. |
| Keywords: | SMB, SaaS, software-as-a-service, ERP, Glovia, discrete manufacturing |
The conventional wisdom in the enterprise software market these days is that key ERP and other application decisions have been made within many large manufacturing companies. As a result, purveyors of these software products, in search of new growth opportunities, are shifting attention and resources to the so-called small and medium-size market, a segment defined variously, and inconsistently, by revenue, by number of employees, or even by type of manufacturing. The question faced by many of the software vendors, though, has not been whether to go after the SMB market. They clearly understand its large size and potential. The issue for them continues to be how to approach the market organizationally: how should they structure themselves internally; how do they employ, in some instances, third-party distribution channels to reach this very large and diverse market; and what form of product do they offer? In January, for example, SAP, which has been plowing the mid-market for years, said that it needed to "accelerate" its efforts and would set up a new organization and devote up to €400 million to sell to companies with between 100 and 500 employees. [Click to continue] |
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