Nelson gave the standard criticism of these kinds of aggregations in yesterday’s earnings webcast. “Private equity firms are not known for their software innovation,” says Nelson who characterized their operations as “slashing costs in R&D while milking customers” and said that the acquired companies would be “viewed as an ATM machine for financiers.” There has been some truth to the criticism that aggregators utilize this strategy. But I would point out that Epicor is fairly new into the Epicor 9 life cycle and the company’s CEO George Klaus says there are several years left to run. Also, Consona and Infor seem to be pumping out a decent amount of product upgrades and new products, so I’d put the situation somewhere in the middle between neglect and innovation. Nelson also claimed that a Gartner study showed NetSuite has moved from No. 10 to No. 8 on the list of Top 10 mid-market ERP companies, jumping past Lawson Software and Exact, and that the same study showed Microsoft had lost 4 percent market share.