Proving bigger isn't always better
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 7/1/2006 6:00:00 AM
Epicor isn't the world's largest ERP software vendor, but it is a market leader in many ways. For instance, long before the enterprise software market starting consolidating, Epicor began building up its product portfolio—and its customer base—by acquiring other midmarket software suppliers.
Epicor also was an early adherent to the service-oriented approach to building software applications. In fact, it claims its flagship Vantage suite was the first ERP package on the market built from scratch with a service-oriented architecture. And as Rod Winger, director of product development, likes to point out, with 20,000 companies running their enterprises on its products, Epicor's customer base, at least from a numerical perspective, is comparable to that of industry leader SAP.
Winger says because Epicor has tailored its solutions for midsize companies, it has an advantage over larger vendors such as SAP and Oracle that have only recently begun to target that space. So while the larger vendors try to pare down their more complex systems to meet the basic needs of the midmarket, Winger says Epicor, with its service-oriented approach, is giving its customers the flexibility—and the competitive edge—to create unique business processes.
Epicor's Service Connect, a Web-service based integration platform, allows creating those business processes using any of Epicor's applications, or those from other vendors. Epicor's recent 26.5-percent increase in revenue over the same period last year indicates the marketplace is buying into that approach.
