ERP Software Companies – SAP, Oracle, Infor and Microsoft

With growth in the popularity of ERP software more and more companies have come up with the plans of owning ERP for their organization, this led to more software companies jumping in the market to fill in the demand with industry specific, solution based and economical ERP solutions.

SAP was established in 1972 in Germany and is largest software service provider in the world today, initially SAP’s ERP solutions were robust and costly and were stamped as solutions for fortune 500 companies only. Today latest version of SAP ERP is SAP ECC 6.0 which was previously named as SAP R/3, other products for mid size and small companies are SAP business one and SAP all in one. These all are part of SAP business suite, SAP business by design is in software as service model for providing hosted ERP solution to its clients.

Oracle Corporation famous for its database and hardware solutions today provides suite of business applications which can perform tasks like CRM, SCM ERP and financial management. Oracle comes with few solutions like Oracle E-business suite, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards enterprise one, JD Edwards world and Siebel. Oracle has made number of famous acquisitions which has improved the versatility in its solution list. The company gained third biggest revenue after Microsoft and IBM and provides services like consulting, training, SaaS and support.

Infor Global Solution is another big player of ERP market established in 2002 with the name of Agilisys in USA, later after acquisition of Infor Global Solutions the company changed its name to its present name. Infor apart from ERP solutions provide number of specific solutions for SCM, CRM, Enterprise asset management, Work force management, Product management, PLM, HCM and Financial management. Industry specific solutions like for Public sector and Hospitality industry also gives Infor a unique identity in the market. Infor ERP solutions have been very popular in manufacturing industry because of its support for all types of manufacturing methods lean, discrete and process.

Microsoft Corporation has four ERP products which have been enhanced and developed after acquisitions which Microsoft made. Microsoft GP, NAV, SL and AX are four ERP solutions along with CRM, all the ERP solutions have almost similar modules and effort was made by Microsoft to merge them to form a single ERP solution which failed.

Companies like Epicor have also worked out a place for themselves amongst the big players of the ERP market by providing economical and solutions focused for particular business areas. Epicor comes with number of enterprise solutions for mid size and small companies like supply chain management which includes support to other areas like customer relationship, supplier relationship and supply chain execution. Other offerings from the company cover areas like human capital, retail, service and IT services management. Epicor tried to unify all the solutions in Epicor 9 to provide one single solution but this product needs some more enhancements for proper functioning.

Netsuite is world’s leading hosted ERP service provider, though company mainly focuses on mid size market and has chunk of its clientele from this sector but has launched Netsuite Global one which supports divisions of large organizations and companies with many subsidiaries and divisions by features like consolidation, multi-currency, and languages.

There are numerous other small and big ERP solution providers like Sage, Syspro, Ramco, Intacct, Lawson Software, Baan etc playing an important role in developing the ERP market.

Leave a Reply