The survey findings aren?t really surprising, Joe. Past trends in ERP have dictated that companies have spent a lot of time and money implementing ?big? all encompassing systems. They?re not about to rip those out and replace them with SaaS and nor should they. At UNIT4 we are finding that large multi-nationals are taking a hybrid approach, where they hook a multi-tenant SaaS accounting solution like FinancialForce.com into new franchises or operating divisions which then feed into a head office ERP/finance system like Agresso Business World, SAP etc. At the mid-level, companies are still mostly choosing on-premise but are demanding more flexibility in the software and how it is delivered, including hosted or 'private cloud' options. Vendors that can?t deliver that will find themselves in trouble.
We are seeing a lot of smaller organisations, depending how specialist their requirements are, choosing a cloud platform approach, where they build their own tailor-made, 'best of class' ERP in the cloud on a single platform. What is clear in the area of ERP is that companies are rebelling against the typical ?big, inflexible ERP? that had become commonplace and realising that there are other, more agile options available to them.
Private cloud implementations are catching on in a big way for enterprise resource planning applications. Only many managers and executives don’t realize they’re doing “cloud computing.”
Perhaps, as with service oriented architecture, businesspeople want solutions that can deliver greater revenues and increase market share — they’re never going to ask for SOA or private clouds.
Many managers and executives don’t realize they may already have ‘private clouds.’
These observations were confirmed in a new survey commissioned by IFS North America, based on interviews with 325 manufacturing enterprises. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Chuck Rathmann, IFS industry analyst, about the results, which are scheduled for release later this month.
The survey found that the term “private cloud” is not well known among manufacturing executives, with only about six percent saying they are “very familiar” with this term, unprompted.
However, when the concept of private cloud is defined for the respondents, more than a fifth of the respondents, 22 percent, say that is what they’re doing for their ERP solutions. “We asked people about their perceptions of private cloud without defining it,” Chuck explains. “In unaided recall, less than 10 percent said they were very familiar with the term. But when we defined it for them, a fifth of them said that they were actually using private cloud.”
He observes that “private cloud is the dominant form of cloud computing for ERP. It makes a good deal of sense, you can get a good deal more security and privacy and flexibility than you could under a joint tenancy model.”
Private cloud got higher marks in the survey than Software as a Service, which presumably means using services provided by outside firms. Fifty-five percent said the private cloud approach is better for their operations than SaaS.
The survey found that about 19 percent report they are currently buying software through a SaaS model and just over a third plan to buy software using this type of model in the coming years. Of the group who use a SaaS model, CRM software was mentioned most often (by 41 percent) as the type of software purchased this way. About 25 percent also report buying ERP-based services. “People are talking a lot about software as a service right now, but when it comes to enterprise resource planning, enterprise asset management, on-premise is still by far the dominant way that people are getting their software,” Chuck says.
Loss of control and security concerns are the two greatest obstacles to SaaS, survey respondents say.
