2014 from PwC – “The brave new world of business application software is rapidly transforming how corporate IT departments source and implement all kinds of critical systems. Perhaps nowhere is this truer than in the realm of ERP systems, the software that runs virtually every large company in the world. CIOs are rethinking their approach to ERP, thanks to modular, cloud-based business applications that offer viable alternatives to the unwieldy, inflexible, and expensive systems that have long dominated the sector”
180 View – The idea is that you can stitch together best of breed cloud-based/Software as a Service (SaaS) applications with a core ERP system and create what they call “hybrid ERP”. PwC cautions that the “the hype surrounding these new technologies is sky-high.” We believe that technology for integrating different applications has been around for years and has been called different things including web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA). Web services and SOA technologies were hyped as a panacea to integration between applications but gradually the hype subsided and reality set in. Hopefully one day the reality will match the hype.