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So how did Great Plains get so popular in the first place?
Quick – can you name the most unlikely place to start and build a wildly successful software development firm? Many people might vote for Fargo, ND. Not usually considered a high tech hot spot, it is the birthplace and still the home of one of the most popular and successful business software systems ever developed.
So how did Great Plains do it? A great product, yes, but looking back now, many people might say four other reasons stand out:
Reason One - Microsoft Windows Technology Platform, all the way back in the very early 1980s, Great Plains was one of the first products written to be a multi-user accounting system to run on Microsoft Windows. As PCs and Windows (and especially with the release of Windows NT in the early 1990s) rapidly increased popularity in the business world, Great Plains grew in popularity along with them. Leveraging Microsoft Technology was a good decision at the time – and has been ever since.
However, even back in 1980s, there were certainly at least several other significant competitors also running on Windows, and many more since. How did Great Plains emerge and then stay ahead of the pack?
 Reason Two – Doug Burgum. At this point our hero enters the story. Doug Burgum, a young Stanford MBA, originally from North Dakota, is building a career as a consultant at McKinsey in Chicago and gets a call from the original software developers who founded Great Plains. They want him to come out to Fargo and help them build the business. Doug hesitates, but agrees and then quickly becomes committed. First, he mortgages his Grandfather’s North Dakota farm to by partnership equity in the then financially struggling software firm (total Great Plains employees at the time: 15). Later, when the opportunity came up, he convinces many in his immediate and extended family to chip in their savings and buy out the original partners. Risky? Would seem so. (But it turned out to be not a bad investment at all when Microsoft bought Great Plains in 2001 for over $1 billion dollars.)
However, back in the 1980s, how did Doug turn the business around and start generating the cash flow needed to fund and build his software start up?
Reason Three - Customer Service. "In 1980 one of the lousiest jobs in the industry was working in customer support, talking to someone who'd been on hold for an hour," says Burgum. "We had this theory that customers would gladly pay for service if it was accurate and responsive."
“So in 1987 Great Plains began asking customers to pay for support, and they started pricing service contracts based on response time. It was a whole new paradigm. A customer would pay more for a guaranteed one-hour call-back on a problem, say, than for a three-hour response time. This new model allowed Great Plains to actually earn money by solving customers' problems quickly.”*
*From ’Far out in Fargo’ Jennifer Reese, Stanford Business Magazine, 1999
This emphasis on excellent customer service was especially important for mid-sized organizations that did not have extensive internal support to rely on. Different service packages catered to different service requirements, often dependent on where they were in the product life cycle.
At this point Great Plains had the right technology, strong leadership, loyal customers, and consistent cash flow, but what was it that really drove the growth of the product?
Reason Four - the Partner Channel. This was another key ingredient in Great Plains success (And which Crestwood is proud to be a part of since before the Microsoft purchase). Under Doug’s leadership, Great Plains established and maintained a very large number of loyal and dedicated resellers and consultants though out the U.S. and across much of the rest of the English speaking world.
“Ten thousand people who get up every day and deliver solutions to customers," as Burgum liked to frequently say. Great Plains resellers typically focused on mid-sized businesses and organizations who typically did not have sufficient internal IT resources and so relied on their consulting partner for support. This provided a long term relationships and a steady income stream for these consulting partners.
By the time Microsoft purchased Microsoft purchased Great Plains in 2001, many people at the time said Microsoft was more interested in purchasing access to the Great Plains partner channel than then the Great Plains software product itself! Microsoft was already committed to the Channel Partner model, with tens of thousands of technology partners supporting infrastructure products.
The purchase of Great Plains would now bring Microsoft thousands of more partners, but with a new and different (although frequently overlapping) skill set that Microsoft was increasingly becoming interested in: business applications.
And since then?
With Microsoft’s continuous investment of resources and support, Dynamics GP (as it is now called) has continued to gain market share with small and midsized businesses and organizations.
Okay, an interesting success story, but beyond that, how should Microsoft’s and Great Plain’s success in building a very large number of loyal customers and an extensive partner channel factor into purchasing a new business software application?
3 reasons for starters:
There are a lot of people out there who are knowledgeable, experienced and committed to the software. These are people who work with the product at every level – at Microsoft, the Microsoft Partners, and the End Customers and User Community.
First, at Microsoft, there are still many people working with the product from before Microsoft purchased the Great Plains company and product back in 2001. Many of them are still working out of the Great Plains original home office location in Fargo, North Dakota. They believe in the product and are constantly working to improve it. They have developed relationships with Partners and Customers over the many years and use these resources to generate, implement and validate ongoing improvements to the software.
They are now in position to even better utilize the new and existing Microsoft technologies and leverage the many great products already in use by nearly every organization to enable people to perform their daily tasks quicker and easier.
And the very large maintenance revenue Dynamics GP generates from all those customers provides the money to reinvested back into Dynamics GP. New releases provide significant upgrades to products functionality on roughly a two year cycle – the latest being the 2010 release in May. You can be confident Dynamics GP will be strongly supported now – and into the future.
Second, at the Microsoft Partner level, your organization can benefit in at least two significant ways. One, because of the large potential market, many Microsoft Software Development Partners (ISVs – Independent Solution Developers) are developing and marketing their own products that integrate with Dynamics GP to provide additional functionality. There are a lot of great third party products available with proven performance.
Crestwood has a significant amount of experience and knowledge with these third party products depending on your specific requirements. You may want to review some of the products we recommend on the Partner Solutions Page.
And Two, there is a big benefit in the large number of independent quality Microsoft Consulting Partners locally and across the U.S. who can support your organization. If your business software developer and provider also provide the product consulting and support, and you have a ‘breakdown in communication’ with them - what are you going to do now? With Microsoft Dynamics you always have that very precious commodity –options.
And Third, at the End User level, Many tens of thousands of businesses and organizations are using Dynamics GP to manage their organizations. Hundreds of thousands of end users are using the product every day. They provide a huge community to provide feedback for improvements and upgrades. They are making the product better.
And there are a lot of sources of information and learning resources available to train and support all these people you can utilize - including many large and active users groups and forums, Microsoft and Partner training courses and materials, online newsgroups and blogs and many other resources are available to you to help support your application.
Crestwood offers ongoing webinars and training classes on various applications and products. You are always welcome to Contact Crestwood directly to discuss in more detail your learning and training options.
We would encourage you to keep these benefits in mind as you consider a new ERP accounting software product. Contact Crestwood Associates, your Chicago, Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana source for training and Dynamics GP support.
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