Rating ERP Vendor Names: Good, Bad and the Ugly
Which software vendors have good brand names--and which vendors should have spent some more time considering the alternatives.
If you get only one chance to make a first impression, then it's reasonable to wonder about the obvious and lasting impressions that ERP vendors names make. After all, wouldn't you rather be a Mel than a Melvin? And in high-tech, it's proven that the perfect name can help sell a new product or service for a long, long time.
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Just for some fun, here's a naming critique of the major players in the enterprise software industry:
Sage: What about the Parsley, Rosemary and Thyme?
Epicor: Sounds like a frat boy's definition of a really excellent weekend of partying: "It was an epicor bash, dude!!"
SAP: "Sap." Yeah.
Infor: Seems like something got cut off. Infor-what?
NetSuite: Obviously named during the dotcom boom when everyone and their brother were being christened with the prefix "Net."
QAD: One word: BAD.
IBS: Um, IBS also stands for "Irritable Bowel Syndrome." I'm just saying.
Deltek: "I'm known as Deltek, and I, too, will join the Rebellion in the fight against the evil Darth Vader and the Galactic Empire."
PeopleSoft: Makes me think of warm and fuzzy thoughts—like kitty cats and cozy blankets. Ahhhhhh.
J.D. Edwards: Wasn't that a character on The Dukes of Hazzard?
Lawson: Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...
Workday: All kinds of negative connotations associated with "workday": too long, sometimes tedious and occasionally boring. Was "Vacationday" already taken?
Agresso: We're "aggressive," but with a European flair!
Microsoft: Wait. They sell ERP software? Seriously, for real?
Intacct: The extra "c" is for the "confusion" we had at the printer's shop, which made a mistake on our first set of business cards.
Exact: Maybe we should put an extra "c"—Exacct—on our solution name, too?
Oracle: In case you already didn't know this, we are god-like: We speak the truth from on high.
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