News

Anatomy of the Deal: Nexvue and Microsoft OEM Agreement

Part of our ongoing series offering an inside look at prominent deals in the Microsoft partner community.

• By Lee Pender
• April 14, 2006

Microsoft Corp.- Nexvue Analytics OEM Deal: March 2006

The Partner
NexVue Analytics Corp., a 21-person Microsoft Gold Certified Partner based in Stamford, Conn. NexVue develops BIO (Business Information Optimization), an analytics application for small and midsize companies that provides easy visibility into Microsoft Office and Dynamics SL data and other critical company and industry data.

The Deal
In March, NexVue and Microsoft announced an OEM deal creating a new Microsoft product, BIO for Microsoft Dynamics SL. Formerly known as Microsoft Business Solutions-Solomon, Dynamics SL is part of Microsoft’s recently renamed Dynamics line of enterprise resource planning applications. The entry-level version of BIO for Microsoft Dynamics SL, scheduled for release in June, will cost $3,600 for a two-user license.

The Terms
The parties did not release terms of the deal.

The Market
This deal touches two markets. First, there’s the ERP market for Dynamics dominated on the high end by SAP AG and Oracle Corp., into which Microsoft hopes to make inroads with smaller companies. In addition, there’s the business intelligence market for BIO, a highly competitive sector that includes stars such as Ottawa-based Cognos Inc. and Business Objects SA, based in Levallois-Perret, France and San Jose, Calif. The BI industry maintained momentum through the technology recession of the early part of this decade, and analyst firm Gartner Inc. predicts that the market will grow at a yearly rate of 7.3 percent between 2004 and 2009, at which point it will reach $3 billion. BIO and products like it cut through SQL code, giving nontechnical users easy access to real-time reports on key metrics within a company or industry without requiring IT people to intervene in the report-creation process.

Microsoft made further inroads into BI in April, when the company announced that it had agreed to buy ProClarity Corp., a Boise, Idaho-based BI vendor.

How Partners and Users Will Benefit
The addition of low-level, inexpensive business analytics to Dynamics SL will give Microsoft partners the opportunity to provide midsize companies with the kind of tool usually reserved for larger enterprises, according to NexVue founder and President Dan Schwartz. Midsize companies will have BI functionality without having to make massive investments.

“This is a proof point that we can take a very complex and expensive process bring it down so that for middle-market companies it becomes a less-risky endeavor,” he says.

How NexVue Will Benefit
Aside from financial considerations, Schwartz says, this deal provides evidence for the cost-effectiveness and usefulness of his company’s application. He says NexVue hopes to use the deal as a springboard to be the first BI vendor to successfully bring analytics applications into the mid-market.

How Microsoft Will Benefit
Microsoft saw a need for business analytics in Dynamics SL, Schwartz says. Furthermore, technology focused on midsize companies fits well with Microsoft’s target of bringing ERP to companies outside the Global 2000, says Eric de Jager, director of product management for Solomon in theMicrosoft Business Solutions division.

“We have our market staked out, and it’s going to be hard for (competitors) to come down into it,” de Jager says.