Enterprise Biz Solns

SAP consolidates its position, with runner up Oracle having its indexed score reduced to 45 from 84 last year. Ramco who was at third position last year dropped to fifth position. This year we have merged JD Edwards into PeopleSoft following the merger of the two companies. Even if we had kept them separate, they would have both made it to the Club, with PeopleSoft at fourth and JD Edwards being joint fifth with
Ramco.

Last year, ERP software was a category, and though we did have CRM and SCM in the survey, we did not report them as the numbers were not statistically significant. This year, based on the feedback received in the vendor round table conducted before the survey, the three were combined and called Enterprise Business Solutions to reflect the reality that these were being offered as application suites covering the gamut of the enterprise's business processes.

Microsoft is a new entrant at number three. We are not sure that this is Navision, as the votes for Navision itself have been very low. If it indeed is Navision, then the others have a serious cause for concern, because of the sharp rise in its score.

There is cause for comfort also, given the low brand-loyalty score, and the relatively high percentages that would shift to SAP and Oracle. The top two do not see any change in their brand-loyalty. They go up by a point or two. SAP's biggest gains would come from brands that did not make it to the Club, while for Oracle gains would be slightly more from Microsoft than from any other. Microsoft got leads over second-placed Oracle in government and banking, while SAP maintained its first place in all verticals. Ramco's support is in manufacturing and software, while the largest chunk of Microsoft's votes came from BFSI. The JD Edwards PeopleSoft combine gets almost all its votes from three verticals: ITES/BPO, software and manufacturing.

2003