Remember the movie Clash of the Titans, in which the Greek gods used Earth as a battleground for their competing egos? If you do, you remember that mighty Zeus held all the cards, whimsically dealing his favors to gods and men alike and occasionally releasing the Kraken to destroy a city or two as a sign of his displeasure. Replace Zeus with Microsoft, and the gods with the leading accounting vendors, and you see that Windows NT has become the focus for a new clash of the titans, as vendors converge on the platform.
The accounting applications market used to be stratified along hardware lines such as mainframe, mini, and PC. These segments did not overlap, so vendors and products had clear, easy-to-understand market share. Today's client/server accounting market is much more fluid and consequently more confusing, with products potentially crossing multiple segments. Table 1 divides the accounting software market into four segments: SOHO (small office/home office), workgroup, corporate, and enterprise. These distinctions are guidelines only; accounting applications and the businesses that use them do not always fit in such neat categories.
The potential of the NT platform--by which I mean the Microsoft Windows NT Server OS and its tightly integrated, complementary Microsoft BackOffice applications--has persuaded vendors from all market segments to focus their resources on developing NT versions of their client/server accounting offerings. Enterprise-level vendors such as Dun & Bradstreet Software, J.D. Edwards, PeopleSoft, and SAP, for example, are mixed with middle-market vendors such as Great Plains Software, Platinum Software, Solomon Software, and State Of The Art. Most vendors are also focusing their NT platform offering on Microsoft's SQL Server relational database management system (RDBMS) and integrating functionality more closely with other BackOffice components such as Microsoft's Exchange and Internet Information Server (IIS). For complete buyer's guides to middle-market and enterprise accounting software, visit our Web site at www.winntmag.com.
Besides enjoying the backing of Microsoft's marketing clout, NT is attractive to accounting application vendors because of its versatility for running the variety of core services that modern accounting systems demand. These services include running the application, process, and database services for n-tiered client/server deployments; providing imaging, messaging, and workflow servers to deliver added-value services; enabling connectivity to the Internet using Internet access and proxy (security) servers; and hosting middleware and online analytical processing (OLAP) tools for integrating legacy data and assisting with decision support.
Windows NT Server 4.0 provides a homogenous server platform for managing all these complementary services and has a homogenous user interface--Windows 95's--for both the client and server. NT simplifies how users run applications and how developers maintain applications by focusing on one set of single-vendor, commercially popular APIs.
Enterprise Accounting: Managing Complexity
To the NT platform, enterprise accounting packages bring a breadth and depth of functionality that reflects the need to manage all types of complexity, including
- Organizational complexity: A typical enterprise is multinational, manages dozens or hundreds of subsidiary companies, employs thousands of people, grows by acquisition and merger, maintains multiple lines of business, and (due to vertical integration) undertakes manufacturing of some sort.
- Cultural complexity: Multinational enterprises must handle linguistic diversity; differences in terminology; subtle differences in business practices; and other religious, cultural, and legal complexities that domestic businesses seldom face.
- Process complexity: Enterprise business-process management can be centralized or distributed, autonomous, or focused on shared service centers for managing processes such as procurement, billing, or cash. Business processes can cross functional or legal entity boundaries, or so-called case managers can control them from one point.
- Accounting complexity: Enterprises face multinational statutory compliance issues, a wide diversity of taxation systems, currency risk management, intercompany transactions, global cash management and consolidation, and translation reporting.
To manage such complexity, you need accounting software that is functionally broad and deep. Functionally broad means that enterprise accounting offers a wide range of integrated application modules. Many enterprise accounting software suites have dozens of modules embracing financials, supply chain, manufacturing, and human-resource management. Functionally deep means that enterprise software offers more functionality in every module, plus across-the-board functionality such as handling multicurrency processing or offering multilingual interfaces.
Enterprise Accounting: High Expectations
In the past, enterprise accounting software ran on mainframes. Dun & Bradstreet Software, with its M and E series mainframe accounting applications (former McCormack & Dodge and MSA America products), claims more than 5000 mainframe sites today. Add to this number a few thousand sites from other mainframe accounting suppliers including Integral, SAP America, and Walker Interactive Systems.
Many enterprises also run on minicomputers, a combination of mainframe and midrange platforms, from vendors such as IBM, Digital Equipment, and HP. More than 300,000 of just IBM's midrange AS/400 computers are installed, so you can figure that more than half a million corporate and enterprise accounting systems still run on midrange equipment.
Individuals and workgroups go home at the end of the day, but enterprises never stop. Enterprise accounting users expect a lot of scaleability and availability from their systems. Mainframe and midrange computers are still the dominant enterprise accounting platform in that top 10 percent or so of the market that requires 24 X 7 X 365 system uptime, very high-volume transaction processing, and support for thousands of users. Today, NT is not yet mature enough to handle the demands of these top-end applications.