ManH Customers Fair Very Well in 'Retail 100' List

Published: September 28, 2009

by Alex Woodie

We take competitive claims by vendors with a grain of salt here at The Four Hundred (see IBM Says Microsoft 'Grossly Exaggerated' Exchange Sales Data elsewhere in this newsletter). But we also give credit where credit is due, and from the looks of it, customers of warehouse management system (WMS) software developer Manhattan Associates are disproportionably represented on the Chain Store Age 100 list of the biggest retailers in the United States.

For years, Manhattan Associates has been hailed for its "best of breed" WMS, which is designed to help manage their large-scale product storage and distribution activities. And while ManH develops an open systems product, its RPG-based WMS for i OS servers remains the company's foundational product.

If you've wondered what kind of actual market penetration corresponds with so-called "best of breed" products, now you have a number you can hang your hat on: 35.

That's the number (and percentage) of customers that ManH says it has on the Chain Store Age magazine's annual list of the 100 biggest retailers in the U.S. The latest top 100 report is featured in the magazine's August/September issue, and can be accessed on the Internet in PDF format here.

Name Dropping Alert

According to ManH, some of its customers on this list include: no. 4 Home Depot, with $71 billion in 2008 revenue; no. 26 H.E. Butt Grocery Company, with $14.5 billion in revenue; no. 33 BJ's Wholesale Club, with more than $10 billion in revenues; no. 75 Dick's Sporting Goods, with $4.1 billion in revenues; and no. 82 O'Reilly Auto Parts, with $3.5 billion in revenues.

For permission reasons, ManH did not disclose who the other 27 customers are on this list. It also did not say what percentage of its customers were running the i OS version of its WMS or the one that runs on Unix and Windows, but an educated guess, based on ManH's own ruminations on the established place i OS products have in the WMS field (PDF format) and our analysis of the company's case studies says it's somewhere north of 50 percent.

Judging from the large number of retailers on the list that are known to be AS/400 shops--including Best Buy, Staples, Office Depot, CDW, Kroger Foods, Menards, Meijer, Dollar General, Bass Pro Shops, Ikea, Williams Sonoma, and dozens more--it's not hard to imagine what the rest of ManH's Chain Store Age 100 impressive lineup would look like.

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