The growing use of open-source and SaaS offerings is sharpening one of the enterprise's biggest weapons: enterprise resource planning. CIOs, pay close attention.
Mention enterprise resource planning to CIOs, and you're likely to get an emphatic response--either positive or negative. Depending on their experiences with ERP systems, they'll either profess that it's a game-changing technology that vastly improves enterprise processes, or claim it's the centerpiece of an unwieldy project that consumes incredible amounts of time, money and resources without delivering on its initial promise.
Despite the divergent viewpoints, ERP remains a critical enterprise application for many organizations. That's why CIOs must keep on top of emerging trends in this technology, which has changed significantly since the first platforms arrived in the early 1990s.
Two notable trends that could determine the future of ERP are the emergence of open-source solutions and the delivery of ERP applications as software services.
Source CIO Insight, http://www.cioinsight.com