Brightpearl, formerly called Pearl – is the little cloud ERP vendor that should really be way bigger than it is. As I’ve said previously;

I’ve always thought of it as the little engine that could, with a team of only five people they have managed to build a solution that covers the majority of bases that a real world business might need – stock, email marketing, Ecommerce, helpdesk and the all important migration from other solutions. The reason that I’m so bullish about Pearl is that it delivers on the promise made by The Small Business Web, but does so with all the heavy lifting already finished – Pearl packages up solutions from third parties (MailChimp for email marketing for example) but tightly integrated and seamlessly presented within the main app.

Brightpearl today announced that it is available on the Google Apps Marketplace – thus extending its reach to US and Canadian customers with multi level sales taxes and multiple timezone support. Looking at the reviews that have already been written about the product, users share my positivity about the BrightPearl approach.

To go hand in hand with this release, Brightpearl has added four more data centers to their infrastructure hosted on Amazon EC2. This move should make people more comfortable over the dual concerns of distance from data and data sovereignty.

Brightpearl continues to focus on micro to small business, director Andrew Mulvenna said that:

Our focus is on the needs of smaller, rapidly growing businesses that can save time and money by having a single, well-thought-out system to run their operations, we have developed a system that offers the most important capabilities in one place including CRM, accounting, and inventory management.

I’ve always said that suites will win the ERP wars this time around – that is even truer when looking at offerings aimed at SMBs – these smaller businesses are less able to complete custom integrations than their larger counterparts. With the Google Apps Marketplace integration, Brightpearl are able to target a much larger addressable market, and also to offer even richer integrations with the Google Apps suite.