There was a telling conflation of web postings the week of March 22 that hint that the value proposition behind ERP enterprise software is making a comeback in the market. Note that I said value proposition. Actually I doubt if it ever lost its lustre but that's hard to tell because the trade press and blogoblatherers always emphasize the negative (that's just human nature).
- Here we had a couple of hackers explaining why "enterprise software sucks."
- Here we had IDC research saying IT users are happy with the much maligned by blogosphere rabble rousers enterprise software maintenance they receive.
- Here we had Rich Veague of IFS explaining the ERP value proposition from the ground up.
Rick's article could have been written 20 years ago but instead of the implied criticism of best of breed CRM and logistics software the article would have talked about the drawbacks of freestanding BOMPs or process manufacturing packages.
The anonymous "hackers" whomever they are seem to be old enough to remember this; they point out that the problem is not with the software but with irrational business process flow.
This is not an on-premise supplier vs Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)/cloud/ondemand/I-don't-know-what-I-am supplier discussion although SaaS vendors such as Taleo, RightNow (RNOW) and salesforce.com (CRM) like to position it that way because they are one-trick ponies. [NetSuite (N) is an exception because it offers ERP on demand but let's face it, Netsuite is really Oracle (ORCL).]
Instead this is a value proposition discussion. It will lead in two directions: better middleware and better business process management (BPM), which is what I think of in place of what Veague calls "extended ERP."
-- Dennis Byron
(no position in companies mentioned but I have done market research for many of the companies mentioned.)
I really enjoyed the post. I work for the company – Managing Automation – take a look at this article about : ERP
I think you'll find it interesting.
Posted by: Darin | May 11, 2010 at 11:55 AM