Speaking at a media briefing today, Australia and New Zealand managing director Steve Ironside claimed his Australian operations had managed to wrestle six clients from its key rival in recent times, and was well positioned to continue the trend.
"We are actually making SAP replacements, and receiving more enquiries from SAP sites, where they were not able to provide end to end service," Ironside said. "The SAP customers appear to be questioning the investment they will have to make in upgrades."
However, SAP marketing manager Len Augustine refutes the claim, conceding the company recently lost a subsidiary of BHP to Intentia, but claiming the company's sales were hardly affected.
"Six sounds very high, I know they got a subsidiary of BHP, they are out there, but I certainly wouldn't say they are swamping our base," Augustine said. "The truth is we don't see them all that often, even after launching our SMB product. According to IDC we are still number one in the ERP space."
And although they disagree with respect to who's winning what in the market, both companies are confident there is plenty of room for ERP solutions growth in the manufacturing and retail verticals where the vendor's paths cross.
"By preconfiguring the solutions and lowering the cost of implementation, we can put in twenty to thirty users for about 250 thousand," Augustine said. "Even smaller revenue turnover companies can benefit from an SAP solution - especially in manufacturing and distribution where you now need quite a bit of IT infrastructure to run a business."
Intentia's Ironside said there are a raft of businesses in the same verticals which are suffering under their weight of ERP systems which have been poorly patched to get through Y2K and the GST.
"We are going to see those business look to replace their systems rather than patch them again, and even if only ten percent per year are looking for a replacement we will be looking at healthy growth," Ironside said.
