Another player, Pivotal - which has 1700 customers - was acquired by Hong Kong- based software maker CDC Corp while Microsoft bought Great Plains, Damgaard, Axapta and Navision. wSIDEBAR: Hopes dashed by Onyx CRM provider Onyx has dashed CDC's dreams of adding it to its arsenal by signing an agreement to be acquired by M2M Holdings.

CDC Software, which recently bought out competing mid-market CRM vendor Pivotal, made two offers in early 2006 worth US$50 million and $90 million respectively to acquire Onyx, both of which were refused.

The transaction, expected to close in the third quarter of 2006, is valued at about $92 million and will place Onyx in M2M Holdings asset company, Made2Manage systems.

M2M CEO Jeff Tognoni said the acquisition will allow it to expand its role in the CRM market and said its financial resources will assist Onyx to grow.He said that there is no plan to change Onyx's product roadmap; moreover it intends to include Onyx CRM software among its own ERP products."Onyx's target market is the services sector and it has relatively little presence in manufacturing. [M2M] will evaluate the potential for incorporating Onyx software into [its own] manufacturing-specific CRM products," company officials said.

(Darren Pauli of Computerworld Australia contributed to this article)