Epicor gaining traction; standardising on .Net

Despite recent mergers and acquisitions among ERP companies being predicated on achieving ‘critical mass’ at around $1 billion turnover – think of Infor’s purchase of Mapics and more recently Geac – resurgent mid-market manufacturing ERP software developer Epicor reckons it’s plenty strong enough at $400 million. Says Epicor director of marketing Matt Muldoon: “We have massive development resources and we believe we have good critical mass.” And he adds that, from that perspective, the recent acquisition of CRS, which provides software for the high end retail sector, has enhanced its position. “Sales of Epicor are strong in the manufacturing arena, mostly with Vantage 8 for .Net,” he insists. “We’re aiming that particularly at make-to-order manufacturers and organizations that see themselves as providing high value-add through highly configured and engineered products.” And Link 51 division Shropshire-based Link Lockers’ recent purchase of a Vantage manufacturing and business intelligence suite, due for go-live this summer, is an example of the success of its approach. Link Lockers says it chose the system ahead of Syspro, Microsoft Navision and Axapta and SAP R3. Muldoon also claims success for its Scala enterprise suite, notably in the industrial machinery and pharmaceutical sectors. “That was a very important acquisition because of Scala’s presence across the rest of Europe – in fact, it’s our largest revenue earner in Europe.” Currently, Epicor is working to rebuild all its systems into the .Net environment. “We’ve already done that with parts of our enterprise network: professional services automation – resource management, billing management etc – and also moved all our business intelligence into the .Net environment. “We’re using the Microsoft Sharepoint environment and we’ve also established a consistent portal and web parts generator.”