Microsoft clearly sees that the application software market on its way back to growth and profits. Last week, the company quietly absorbed another Windows application software vendor, Sales Management Systems, which specializes in retail and point-of-sale applications. Neither Microsoft nor SMS provided the financial details of the SMS acquisition. SMS was founded in 1995 in Anaheim, California, and its initial products and the ones that it sells today allow retailers to integrate their point-of-sale terminals with servers running Windows NT and even desktop versions of Windows operating systems, rather than using proprietary point-of-sale servers and terminals from IBM, NCR, and others. That first product was called QuickSell 2000, and it quickly became popular among small retailers. In 1998, SMS expanded beyond a simple one-store, one-server model for its applications and launched QuickSell HQ, a centralized multiple store management system. In early 2000, the company launched QuickSell Commerce, an e-business front end to the retail system that allowed brick-and-mortar stores or store chains to move out onto the Web but keep their QuickSell backend systems. Microsoft bought QuickSell because it needs to beef up the retail capabilities of its Great Plains application suites for Windows NT and Windows 2000 servers.

The Sage Group went to court in Denmark to contest Microsoft's $1.3 billion acquisition of Navision. According to the Danish business newspaper Boersen, the top brass of Sage were in Copenhagen last week with their lawyers to try to block Microsoft's acquisition of Navision on the grounds that Microsoft will bundle Navision applications with its other offerings and kill off the competition, such as Sage. Sage is expected to have its lawyers make similar cases before the competition authorities in England, Germany, and France as well. Whether or not Sage can stop the Navision deal is unclear, but it probably can slow it down if Sage's maneuvers come to the attention of Mario Monti, the commissioner in charge of competition for the European Commission. So far, Monti has been mum about the Navision deal. But he is not afraid to take on Microsoft when he believes that the company has overreached European antitrust laws. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, Monti does with the interests of Sage.

OS/400 application vendor Infinium Software last week announced it has struck an OEM deal with Cognos for business intelligence technology. As part of the deal, Infinium will use Cognos business intelligence software to build its own analytics offering, which Infinium calls Corporate Performance Manager. Infinium CPM powered by Cognos will give corporate executives the information necessary to make profitable planning, forecasting, and budgeting decisions, Infinium says. Infinium CPM is composed of five modules: Infinium Financial Manager, Infinium Reporting Manager, Infinium Analysis Manager, Cognos Visualizer, and Cognos Upfront. The analytics solution comes prepackaged with Infinium applications, including Financial Management, Human Resources and Payroll, CRM, Process Manufacturing, and Materials Management. Users interact with Infinium CPM through a standard browser interface.

AMR Research says that Manhattan Associates is at the top of the heap in the warehouse management systems market. Manhattan Associates, the Atlanta, Georgia, software company that sells the successful OS/400-based PkMS warehousing system, managed to significantly build revenue from license fees last year, which was quite a feat compared with the many players in the field that did not post big gains, the Boston, Massachusetts, research group said. The author of the report, AMR's Michael Bittner, characterized Manhattan's rise to the top as the result of shrewd reactions to the slow-moving WMS market, which Bittner said had been beset by its "specialized, customization- and integration-centric nature" and a lack of global players. AMR took a look at 30 software vendors for the April report and concluded that the WMS market will reach $1.4 billion by 2005.

Swedish OS/400 ERP vendor Intentia International AB last week appointed Linus Parker as the new president of its Intentia Americas operation, based in Schaumberg, Illinois. For the 12 months before this promotion, which will give him oversight of the ERP company's operations in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, Parker was the vice president of Global Business Development for Intentia International. Before that, he was managing director of Intentia UK and spent seven years with Oracle. Parker takes over for Mike Nutter, who is now the vice president of global account operations for the parent company. Also last week, Intentia announced that Sweden's business weekly magazine has ranked Intentia as the largest software company in the country.