Cloud Tech News

During 2012 the enterprise resource planning (ERP) market experienced sluggish growth of just 2.2%, yet software as a service (SaaS), financial management and human capital management (HCM) applications showed potential for breakout growth. Through the challenging times of the previous year, however, SAP still retained worldwide market share leadership.

The best manufacturers I've visited this year all share a common attribute: they are obsessed with making themselves as easy as possible to work with from a supply chain, distribution and services standpoint. Many are evaluating cloud-based manufacturing applications including enterprise resource planning (ERP), and several have adopted cloud-based applications across their companies.

While corporations have embraced cloud technology for everything from customer relationship management to recruitment, one area of the business has lagged behind. CFOs and treasurers are often slower to bring their systems into the cloud than their colleagues across the business; so what's holding them back and how could they benefit from cloud technology?

As public cloud computing gains greater adoption across enterprises, there's an increased level of spending occurring on infrastructure-related services, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Enterprises are prioritising how to get cloud platforms integrated with legacy systems to make use of the years of data they have accumulated.

IT is an acronym-crazed world. So crazy that sometimes - when running out of three letter ones - we simply recycle them or add sequence numbers. Remember MRP, which used to mean Material Requirements Planning, but the became Manufacturing Resource Planning (called MRP II to avoid confusion) to only a couple of years later resurface as ERP. Take a look at CPR (cloud process re-engineering) too...

As a business consulting company, we frequently hear the comment, “We are more than capable of building our own home-grown technology ecosystem.” That's great. But before you jump in head-first, and start buying a bunch of servers and stalking developers on LinkedIn, you should consider everything required to build, implement, and maintain your system.

When the CEO of a rust-belt manufacturer speaks of cloud computing as critical to his company's business strategies for competing globally, it's clear a fundamental shift is underway.

From the obvious to the outrageous, enterprise software predictions often span a wide spectrum at the beginning of every year. In enterprise software, there are many safe harbours to dock predictions in, from broad industry consolidation to Oracle buying more companies.