Almost famous and absolutely fabulous

Given all the press coverage of the talks Microsoft and SAP held about possibly hooking up—word of which came to light in conjunction with the U.S. Justice Department's lawsuit to block Oracle's $7.7-billion takeover bid for PeopleSoft—someone said that SAP is now "almost famous." The same could be said about the entire market for enterprise business applications.

Beginning with Microsoft's own antitrust travails of the last several years, the technology industry has learned that one cost of this newly found fame is increasing involvement in politics. That means more money spent on campaign contributions, lobbying government officials, and lawyers; and being tar-brushed on issues like globalization and outsourcing.

Welcome to the 2004 MSI Top 100 issue, ranking the leading vendors of business application and manufacturing system software. The pullout listing is based on a vendor survey and additional research conducted by MSI. The rankings are based on total revenues for calendar year 2003, except where otherwise noted. In the main, the exceptions are for vendors that have substantial hardware sales or species of software—such as database technology—outside the scope of the list.

Because the very largest technology vendors—IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, and others—cannot readily break out their revenues in specific product categories such as applications and integration technology, the Top 100 list makes no note of their substantial contributions. Thus the list is focused on independent software vendors (ISVs) in the broadest sense: the ISVs that drive software innovation. In any case, MSI will take a close look at the top global IT providers in this year's October issue. Microsoft Business Solutions, its enterprise applications unit, is of course included in the Top 100.

The top end of the Top 100 is dominated by the global ERP players, but quickly becomes a rich mix of product, supply chain, automation, and customer-facing solutions. Because thumbnail descriptions don't always do justice—any more than do the vendors' own marketing materials—supplementary "Top Ten" listings for these major categories are found in the chart introduction on page 16.

The single biggest change to the 2004 MSI Top 100 from previous years is inclusion of vendors for business intelligence, content management, enterprise application integration, and business process management. A detailed discussion of how these applications impact operations can be found in Executive Editor Sid Hill's cover story.

It could be said that the annual July MSI Top 100 issue is "market-facing," and we do hope the Top 100 gives our readers an actionable profile of a dynamic industry making a major contribution to manufacturing and supply chain productivity. It's that constant interplay—as lean, outsourcing, and fragmented supply chains are made possible by IT, and IT then changes to support an evolving business landscape—that makes covering this industry absolutely fabulous.