A whole new spin

Enterprise vendors have thwarted the attempts of supply chain, customer, and supplier management vendors to make their solutions "systems of record." Yet viable best-of-breed vendors in these and other categories remain. No one knows, though, how it will go down with the new intelligence and integration vendors listed in this year's Top 100.

The 2004 listing has more than 20 intelligence and integration vendors with revenues from $100 million to more than $500 million. That gives these vendors a certain scale. Based on either software function or the technology the software is based on, business intelligence and integration may not be as easy for transaction-oriented ERP to absorb as some of the others it already has ingested. And it may not be in users' best interests to get these newer-type solutions from their enterprise vendors.

The idea of a "system of record" is that all the information pertinent to a major functional space is gathered in a single system. Enterprise systems began in production and inventory control, but now encompass human resources, finance, and order management. The enterprise system, by definition, is a system of record.

Just a few years ago, many thought the Internet boom would bring with it new systems of record. The trade exchange phenomenon could be seen as an attempt to establish a system of record that would sit over multiple ERP systems. Product-data solutions vendors have been trying to carve out a larger space for themselves for as many as 10 years, and given the prominence of CAD and automation vendors in the Top 100, one would have to say these type data sets are special.

At the end of the day, when it comes to business intelligence and content management on the one hand, and integration and process management technologies on the other, it could be said these solutions are tailor-made for an era in which so many companies have settled on ERP as their system of record, and now are looking to extract greater value from it.