When Small Businesses Grow to Mid Markets

A lot of big business started out small. Some of today largest retailers like Amazon and Walmart had started somewhere very small some time ago.

I have not heard of anybody who gets into business and plans to stay the way he started until he dies. Anybody wants to get into business because he or she wants to grow. This is the reason why many career oriented people quite their regular day jobs and get into business because the potential for growth is not hindered by any corporate ladder or bureaucracy.

So now you are in your business and a few months later, you notice that your product distribution or manufacturing is reaching a tipping point. You will begin to see that customer orders cannot keep up with deliveries from suppliers. Your product volume and request can no longer fit into your spreadsheets and suddenly you wake up and your organization has become too big that you can no longer talk to one another.

This means that you business has grown and you need to invest in software applications to keep up with the demands of your growth.

It is time that you need to implement an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. But then when you research about ERP, you are being pointed to exorbitantly priced ERP applications which you think have too much features that you feel like hitting a small nail with a sledge hammer.

The advantage of smaller business nowadays is that business solutions are easy to come by. Today, even the giant ERP vendors like SAP, Microsoft and Oracle, who, for years have been focused on marketing ERP for multinational corporations, are now developing ERP implementations for midmarket enterprises.

SAP easily comes to mind with talking about ERP for big corporations. But they have midmarket solutions as well. A product which has been in the works for months which is codenamed A1S is targeted to midmarket enterprises. SAP is reported to have invested between $414 million and $552 million over eight quarters to do research and development of business solutions for midmarkets.

Microsoft is also coming up with its Titan multitenant CRM, a component of an ERP which is also targeted for midmarkets. A lot of Microsoft's role based ERP applications are bundled with Windows servers.

Not to be left behind, Oracle is planning to strengthen a partnership with IBM to respond to ERP needs of small and medium sized businesses with Oracle's JD Edwards Enterprise One software on IBM platforms.

These ERP solutions for mid-market will surely boost small to medium sized enterprises as they move in transition from activities that take days automated to a few minutes.

It is a good thing to know that these ERP vendors have realized of the mid-market. Multination corporations may be big and have lots of assets but mid-market businesses are a lot more abundant. Taken as a whole, they may even be better market for ERP products compared to multinational companies.