Once you get past the very largest mega-suite providers, only a handful of enterprise vendors remain having annual revenues of at least $200 million. Of those, only IFS, Intentia, and QAD could be said to have product lines born of a single thread of development. In other words, their strategies haven't involved buying up distressed vendors so as to mine installed bases for maintenance revenues.

IFS and Intentia both have Swedish origins and thus cut their teeth on globalization. But even though native to the world's largest ERP market—the U.S.—QAD gets slightly more than half its revenues from outside North America. It seems especially appropriate then that the keynote speaker at QAD's annual user conference—called Explore and held this past May—was Ernesto Zedillo, the former president of Mexico [see accompanying story].

Jerry Sommerville, manager, enterprise systems, with Dublin, Ohio-based medical-device maker Medex, says his company recently implemented eB2, QAD's enterprise business system, in 11 countries, nine languages, and six currencies. The company already was a QAD systems user, but had previously run on a number of highly customized individual instances.

"The challenge was to get on a standard platform to help us understand what it takes to do business on a global basis," says Sommerville.

QAD made two announcements bearing on its ability to support manufacturing globalization:

QAD recently purchased assets from Oxford Consulting, a specialist in EDI, so as to form an EDI business practice.

In a survey of the Chinese automotive market by the Automotive Industry Action Group and IBM, the Economist corporate network reported that QAD is the largest ERP provider in China.