Umbrella marketing: Best pulls MIP and others together. (Software).

After acquisition comes consolidation and from there the marketing of combined products. Best Software has re-launched its corporate image after an aggressive couple of years of gobbling up software firms, which include nonprofit products.

It comes just weeks after Microsoft used the annual Stampede reseller conference to announce its plans for the integration of its Great Plains and Navision acquisitions.

Best Software, which is the U.S. arm of U.K.-based software giant Sage, outlined at a recent press briefing its strategy for integrating the numerous companies and brand names that have been operating fairly autonomously for the past several years.

During the past decade, Sage has gone on an acquisition rampage, first acquiring accounting software vendor DacEasy, also buying the popular Time and Billing vendorTimeslips, then State of The Art Software, which developed and sells high-end accounting packages, including BusinessWorks, MAS 90, MAS 200, and MAS 500.

In recent years, Sage, which renamed itself Best Software here in the United States last year, has acquired an entire stable of accounting and business software companies. These include Peachtree Software, Best Software, Abra Software, and Interlogix, which sells the popular ACT! Contact management and Sales Logix applications.

Most recent was the acquisition of Micro Information Products (MIP) and JSI Fundraising Systems. These two companies are now united under the imprimatur of the Best Software Nonprofit and Government Accounting Division with MIP President Kent Hollrah as the division president.

In a series of presentations, led by Best Software's CEO Ron Verni, divisional executives outlined their plans for the next several years. All expect the acquisition push to continue, and provide a major source of revenue expansion for the company.

Also making a presentation was Nina Smith, chief marketing officer for the company as a whole. Smith introduced a new corporate umbrella, relegating familiar corporate names such as Peachtree and MIP into brand and product names under the Best Software logo. To position this branding, Best Software will be introducing a series of new advertisements in more than 30 publications highlighting Best Software's "For Life" tag line, referring to the desire to keep a satisfied customer for that length of time.

More of MIP?

One thing that came through very clearly at the press conference is that while product lines are clearly defined as divisional responsibilities, Best Software as a whole is trying to encourage a broader outlook in its reseller channel. With product offerings that span the small-and-middle sized accounting market, human resources, customer resource management and nonprofit accounting and fundraising, Best Software resellers have a cornucopia of products to offer, should they want to expand their product lines.

Those resellers represent a lot of potential for MIP, though the vendor has built a considerable reseller channel already during the past 20 years that it has been in existence. With more cooperation between the different divisions now a corporate mandate and initiative, MIP may see tighter integration with the best selling contact manager on the market, ACT!.

With ACT! and the fundraising applications from JSI Fundraising Systems now both Best Software products, it may become easier for those nonprofits now using ACT! as the cornerstone of their fundraising efforts, to move up to Paradigm or Millennium applications.

Under pressure

As the market continues to consolidate, Best Software is emerging as one of a trio of major accounting software players, with Intuit and Microsoft as the other points of the triangle. With Intuit's acquisition of American Fund-ware earlier this year, only Microsoft, among the three accounting software giants, is left without a formal nonprofit accounting offering. At the moment, there's no clear indication that the Redmond, Wash.-based software behemoth intends to compete in the nonprofit niche, which is, after all, one of the smaller vertical accounting markets.

This might be good news for MIP which stands to benefit from the many nonprofit users who have kludged together a nonprofit system using the more mainstream Peachtree Accounting software. If Best Software can make the migration path an easy one, MIP could find itself with thousands of additional users, especially since it now offers the less expensive NPS INTRO software.

In the works, however, according to the road plan offered by Best Software, are vertical versions of the company's Peachtree Accounting software. Next year should see versions of Peachtree Accounting for manufacturing and distribution companies. A nonprofit version of the software was also mentioned during the presentation. While this low-cost Peachtree solution may appeal to cash-strapped nonprofits, it may also eat into future sales of the NPS INTRO product.

Or, it may not have that impact. As Tim Mills-Groninger, associate executive director of the IT Resource Center in Chicago observed, "Intuit seems to be doing very nicely partnering with B-to-P on a low-end solution, while selling its American Fundware to those nonprofits that need a higher-end solution." Best's Nonprofit Division president Hollrah also sees the Peachtree vertical as a positive event. "It's not just about selling MIP software," he said. "The real job is to get the prospect to the appropriate product. Whether that's NPS or Peachtree is less important than whether we are best serving the customer's needs." Hollrah sees the proposed upcoming Peachtree for Nonprofits as being more of an entry-level product than MIP's current offerings, and as with other product lines in the Best Software corporate lineup, providing a great upgrade prospect into the higher-end MIP and JSI Fundraising Systems products.

Product migration is another area that affords possible large future revenues for the Best Software organization. Announced on October 1 is the new Best Software Migration Center. This will be a resource for both resellers and customers, with specially trained consultants and technicians who can assist with migration concerns during the sales process, and help the customer move comfortably from one software package to another, or even from one vendor to another.

"We're expecting the Migration Center to incorporate a two-fold process," said Hollrah. "First is leading a prospect to a suitable product for where they are in their organizational lifecycle. Once that is accomplished, the Migration Center can help them get their data moved over." A user who has gone through a non-painful migration and upgrade process is much more likely to stay with the software supplier for future upgrades.

Best Software's intention in bringing all of its brands and companies under a single corporate umbrella is to make its users cognizant that there are migration and upgrade paths within the same overall company. It is, however, possible that this strategy could backfire. Right now, a user unhappy with MIP might look to a custom version of MAS 90 as a solution, thinking that they were dealing with another vendor entirely.

Time, of course, provides the ultimate judgment of whether the tighter integration of the company will have proven to be the right decision. In the meantime, the former MIP president said he is delighted with the way that things are going since the acquisition, and has even higher hopes for the future.

Ted Needleman is the former associate publisher and editor-in-chief of Accounting Technology magazine. He is now a technology consultant and writer based in Stony Point, N.Y. His email address is [e-mail]