Financing an ERP product does not equal financing a car

Microsoft offers zero percent financing on Dynamics ERP and CRM. Given the economy and the credit crunch, it must make a lot of sense, right? Not really. In ERP, licensing the product is far from being the most significant cost. Training, implementation, change management, additional hardware, additional software (like database), third party software components that goes with the new package (add ons are common addition to ERP implementations) make the money you spend with Microsoft the smallest part of your investment.

SaaS at the edge of the enterprise

SAP, Oracle and Microsoft solutions will not go away anytime soon. While the SaaS discussion is gaining ground in the last months, we still don’t see massive (or even minor) conversion of enterprises from mission critical systems like SAP to SaaS based applications. Netsuite for example, is reported to go after SAP customers in a competitive conversion offer. I doubt that they will get too many real R/3 customers that are fully deployed converting- the only success they may enjoy is from customers that never deployed SAP or subsidiaries of SAP shops that used something else (say MS-Dynamics) and now want a better solution.