SAP consultant Nexus Technology Inc is betting that Oracle Corp will provide it with its next biggest ERP opportunity. It is trying to figure out who is going to be around when the market shakes out, but at the moment Baan, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards aren’t doing it for the Des Plaines, Illinois company.
This week the 60-person company gets a leg-up into the lower-end of the market courtesy of application service provider Exodus Communications Inc which has tapped Nexus to be its first partner for implementing SAP in small and middle tier companies. Although SAP has already set the bar on three ASP ‘certified’ partners, Qwest, EDS and Eonline, it doesn’t mean that other ASPs won’t carry its software. They just won’t get the same attention from SAP.
Nexus, which installs and maintains SAP programs, denies SAP or any ERP software is becoming a commodity. There are still, it believes, competitive advantages to implementing ERP. The fact that the consulting market is growing hand over fist is not, Nexus claims, due to increasing complexity of the product itself, but more that customers want to integrate SAP programs more widely within their organizations. That’s why it’s now taking on the task of building out SAP installs into e-commerce and other application markets. Three-year-old Nexus expects to do $20m this year, up from $12m last.
