Hi, Fernando.

>That's REALLY good news from our fellows in Microsoft!!!
>
>...or we get employed by them or we'll have to start a plantation of bananas, perhaps the only "business model" left so far for many of us (following your thougt above...)!

Indeed, it can be an opportunity. We're starting to look at this software and learn how to interact with it. As always in most business scenarios, the packaged solution doesn't solve all the needs of the company, leaving plenty of room to customization.

When we didn't have databases, we spent an awful lot of time coding clever data access mechanisms to get to data. Once they entered this market and we had DBs at low prices, we start developing on top of that. I think that -with the obvious differences- we can be much in the same position in some three to five years.

As an example, what I saw in Great Plains was a modest ERP covering all the accounting tasks with a quite stable code base. But the manufacturing modules (something that requires a LOT of understanding and customization) are really poor. So we could focus on integrating our manufacturing solutions, that are quite advanced.

Hope this clarifies my point of view,