Greetings and Welcome to enVista Enterprise Solutions’ Inaugural Newsletter! 

Our Enterprise newsletter will offer the up-to-date information that your company needs as you evaluate, select and implement Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. We will offer industry news, analyst coverage and client success stories so that you can see how other companies are achieving success leveraging business technology. Enterprise is the first newsletter to tackle ERP systems from a supply chain best practices perspective to help business leaders develop the processes and solutions needed to get the most from their systems investment.

Since enVista began a formal partnership with Microsoft as a Microsoft Dynamics AX partner three years ago, we have experienced significant growth of our business consulting and technology practices. We attribute that growth to two main areas:

• enVista’s significant strength, industry expertise and qualifications in multi-channel distribution and transportation; and,
• The supportive channel that Microsoft has built for its Dynamics business partners. During these three years, enVista has achieved:
• GOLD Partner status with Microsoft
• has been selected as one of the few ‘Dynamics AX for Retail’ National Partners, and has been named to the esteemed Partner Advisory Council (PAC) for Microsoft...

The Magic Quadrant for Midmarket and Tier 2-Oriented ERP for Product-Centric Companies addresses the needs of product-centric companies or divisions of enterprises with between 100 and 999 employees, and with annual revenue between $50 million and $1 billion. These enterprises have limited IT resources and seek ERP systems that support their differentiating business processes well with deep functionality, but do not require significant overhead in the non-differentiating business areas (meaning the systems must minimize total cost of ownership [TCO] and complexity).

Although some see this market as large and mature, Gartner sees this market as undergoing a "changing of the guard," with older, established systems with deep functionality being displaced by more modern and agile systems. The key trends driving changes in this market are:

• The packaging of industry-specific functionality
• Technology modernization using service-oriented architecture (SOA)
• The need for global deployments

As this change continues, Gartner concludes that only one offering qualifies as a leader in the market at this time: Microsoft Dynamics AX. The product is robust, it delivers low TCO through integration with other Microsoft products, and, most importantly for the midmarket, Microsoft is adept at managing its channel of resellers. However, this offering has challenges with global implementations, and users are dependent on both Microsoft and the implementation partner for support.