A few years ago, Microsoft went on a $2 billion acquisition binge of companies that supply business management software to small and mid-size organizations; Axapta, Great Plains, Navision, and Solomon. These applications were then managed, within Microsoft, by the Business Solutions Group. In 2005, it became increasingly public that Microsoft were going to integrate these products into one product offering. 'Project Green' was the working title for this massive technical and marketing integration project.

The ambitious objective of Project Green is to architect a tightly integrated software stack from OS, through database, application and Office.

In September 2005, Microsoft rebranded the Business Solutions Group as Microsoft Dynamics (http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/default.mspx). The four assimilated business management packages are now called Microsoft Dynamics AX, Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, and Microsoft Dynamics SL. The Dynamics lineup also includes Microsoft's CRM offering, now rebranded as Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Coupled with Microsoft's strength in database (SQL2005) and business integration (BizTalk) software, the Dynamics rebranding looks like Microsoft are positioning themselves as a serious player in the Financial/ERP/SCM software supplier market. It will however be 2008 before the real fruits of Project Green start to appear. Microsoft have committed to supporting existing products until 2013.

Microsoft's initial focus will be on small to mid-size companies. In this space they will compete with companies like Intuit and Sage/Best. However existing players in the ERP space such as SAP and Oracle are also starting to focus on smaller size customers, so competition in this sector will really heat up.