CRM Vendor Epicor Announces Desktop ERP For Microsoft

Epicor's hosting a company picnic, Epicor Perspectives 2006, and today the company's announced the introduction of Epicor Information Worker, a new desktop productivity product that delivers Epicor's enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications on the 2007 Microsoft (News - Alert) Office system, providing information workers with improved access to business data.

Unveiled to more than 2,100 attendees at Epicor Perspectives 2006, the company's annual customer conference, Epicor IW  is built using service-oriented architecture principles with Microsoft .NET- based technologies, Epicor IW uses the Microsoft Office system to "enhance the user experience of an Epicor application with familiar desktop productivity tools," according to company officials.

Using Epicor IW, users are able to synchronize Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 contacts, appointments and tasks with an Epicor application along with other items such as customer information, sales history, inventory levels and production schedule for offline access. A simple matter of searching and dragging Epicor ERP information from the Epicor Task Pane to fields on a Microsoft Office Word 2007 document or Microsoft Office Excel 2007 spreadsheet is all that is needed, according to company officials.

Yesterday the CRM vendor, which sells primarily to the midmarket and divisions of larger firms, announced that based on preliminary financial data, the company expects total revenue for the third quarter ended September 30, 2006 to be between $95 million and $96 million, exceeding the company's earlier provided third quarter revenue guidance.

Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share for the third quarter is also expected to exceed the company's guidance.

On July 26 the company announced total revenues for the third quarter were expected to be approximately $93 million, with non-GAAP earnings of $0.17 per diluted share based on a weighted average share count of approximately 57 million shares.

George Klaus, chairman and CEO of Epicor, credited the  preliminary results' performance to "solid organic growth, complemented by the contribution from the CRS Retail Systems business, which we acquired in December 2005."

They've had some sales successes recently -- last month Bracknell, England-based Planned Storage Systems, an independent manufacturers of storage products, said they'd deploy Epicor Software's (News - Alert) Vantage 8.0 manufacturing enterprise resource planning (ERP) product to help improve its business processes as it expands its manufacturing capability into Eastern Europe.

Epicor has also recently introduced new features and functionality "to address specific requirements for automotive manufacturers in the latest release of Epicor Vantage," its global manufacturing product, according to company officials.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims’ columnist page.

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