Microsoft unit to launch next gen software

Microsoft Great Plains Business Solutions (MSGP), a division of Microsoft Corp. in the Philippines, is launching soon its next generation software (next gen) which will serve as building blocks for a new breed of modules vital in the .Net strategy.

MSGP Philippine R&D Center managing director Joey Gurango said the vision for their next gen products is in sync with that of the .Net platform, a Microsoft strategy that is described as a set of software technologies for connecting information, people, systems, and devices.

In other developments, the company announced that it is expecting to initially generate 10 percent of the Asia Pacific revenues from its professional services initiative, and ultimately increasing this to 40 percent in the next three years, MSGP Asia Pacific professional services manager Perry Beebe announced.

In the Philippines, professional services are centered in three locations: Australia, Singapore, and the Philippines. These include training, support, and consulting.

"Our vision for our next gen products is the same vision .Net itself brings, which is basically interconnectivity that allows you to access information at your fingertips anytime, anywhere on your device. While .Net provides the infrastructure and mechanism by which companies can get information, we will provide the software or the application that will manage the information that they want to get hold of," he said.

As a result, companies can now take these .Net web services and mix and match as needed in order to create their own solutions rather than having always to build modules from scratch. "Of course, they’ll still need to create their own components or maybe even acquire components from other companies. All we want to do is create a framework so we have a standard that they can work around to create a full-blown enterprise resource planning (ERP) application," Gurango added.

He said the company expects the full suite of its next gen software to be out between 2004 and 2005, but explained that firms that want to be part of the .Net evolution need not wait that long to be able to enjoy these applications.

"We are not going to do a global find and replace strategy, but rather slowly enhance our current generation products using components under the .Net platform to allow interconnectivity. By the advent of the .Net platform in two to three years’ time, all the components will be in place and ready for deployment," Gurango explained.

MSGP has four target groups in mind for the Next Gen software: the enterprise resource management (ERM) group which is essentially financial management or accounting; supply chain management (SCM) group on the application for distributing products and services; customer relations management (CRM) group which involves managing interactions with customers; and lastly, the business intelligence group. – Mary Ann Reyes