There were a few speed bumps on my rise to minor ERP-guru- dom (Bombay: Failed).

I managed to upset Great Plains after a running a benchmark of GP vs. State of the Art's MAS90 that por trayed their reporting performance in a less than favourable light. Dave Hanna was happy but Doug Burghum wasn't so I learned that benchmarking is a tricky business and promptly exited it.

As technology editor for Controller/Business Finance magazine for 5 years and a contributor to DBMS/Intelligent Enterprise magazine, I cranked out hundreds of articles, papers and advertorial supplements that could both positively and negatively impact the sales and marketing of mid-tier accounting software. You're bound to upset a few people doing that.

The Softworld shows were also used by our advertising team, including the legendary Frank Guzzardo, to book an 'audience' with the editor, as he sat ensconced in his suite, dispensing his pearls of wisdom to the 'favoured ones'. Or as Jim Hart of rival Strategic Finance magazine put it 'sat in your ivory tower'.

The six books and numerous articles I pushed out in 1995-2000 all had one goal in mind: to raise user expectations of ERP software and to help encourage vendors to step up to the plate and deliver more innovation in their software. The books certainly didn't earn much money.

Except that is for Financial Analytics, which was profitable before it was even published via the clever idea of selling a series of one page ads in the text to vendors and basically giving the book back to them as a freebie.

It remains my most profitable publication by far and still makes a lot of sense despite the ads and my early evangelisation of Extensible Reporting Business Language (XBRL).