What's the future of ERP? What kind of a silly question is that, you may be asking yourself. First off, predicting the future--especially in the technology world--is a fool's errand, best handled by Ouija Boards and IT analysts' dartboards. And isn't the future of ERP already here? Software-as-a-service, on-demand apps, enterprise 2.0 collaboration, open-source software, virtualization, cloud platforms. What more is there?

Right now, not much else. But the real future of enterprise software isn't exclusively based on wow-factor applications and functionality. It's about not only knowing which new applications and delivery models can immediately help the business; but also having the technological fleet of foot to take advantage of those new apps fast. That means not in 18 months or next quarter, but whenever line-of-business managers truly need that functionality. Think days.

In addition, CIOs and IT staffs must be certain that the underlying architecture and systems decisions they have made (or are making right now) are guided by a roadmap that allows for flexibility- an ability to adapt enterprise technology to disruptive business events as they occur.

By that definition, then, it's readily apparent that the status quo with ERP isn't going to cut it anymore. The deleterious global recession and a jobless recovery have made that quite clear.

When asked if the recession will ultimately prove to be a turning point in ERP's history, Jim Hayes, Global Managing Director, Accenture's Oracle practice, who's worked for decades with enterprise software, says "I'm a believer that from disruption comes opportunity. The kind of disruptions that we’ve seen has been painful, certainly on one level, but maybe therapeutic, on another level, because it makes us rethink things."

But change has never come easily or quickly to the ERP universe. MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and The Wharton School's Adam Saunders note in their new book Wired for Innovation that it typically takes between five to seven years for major IT investments, like ERP systems, to deliver substantial returns. That's due to the multi-year period it usually takes today's organizations to make the enterprise-wide changes needed to truly capitalize on the new IT applications and systems, contend Brynjolfsson and Saunders.

Do you have that kind of time anymore? Thought not.

The Recession That Altered the Future of Business Software

If anything positive has come out of 18 months of economic and business chaos, it is that companies of every size, in every industry, in every country, have made a much needed and thorough re-examination of their ERP investments and strategies. (And some might add the word finally.) What's the true cost? ask CEOs. Does the benefit equal the investment? query CFOs. Are we getting the expected value from ERP systems? demand line-of-business managers?

Of late, when those core constituents haven't been satisfied with the answers they've gotten in response from IT leaders, they've been brazen enough to raise once-heretical questions: What are the alternatives? Do we have to stick with SAP or Oracle, just because we always have? How about looking into software-as-a-service? For instance, Siemens, the German electronics and engineering giant and long-time customer of SAP, created an uproar when details leaked that it was questioning its ERP maintenance and support service agreement. Though Siemens and SAP eventually hammered out a deal--the details of which remain clouded, to some in the industry--the players and relationships involved in the dust-up made it a watershed event. If Siemens is challenging the status quo, then maybe we should too?

To Jon Reed, an independent analyst, SAP Mentor and blogger at JonERP.com, outdated pricing models (such as ERP maintenance agreements) and ERP systems' turtle's pace of innovation are going to be two critical areas for the vendor community in the near future. "I think the economy is a game changer," he says. "Even when it returns, it will return in a way that will support different ERP business models than have been dominant in the past. Companies that can re-invent themselves--with more flexibility around service offerings--that's going to be key."

Make no mistake: Enterprise software vendors have recently felt more economic hardship and had to tolerate more customer objections than ever before in their histories. And for many, more pain lies in wait. "The big ERP vendors are going to get a big punch in the gut, and to some degree they've already gotten it. They've already gotten some body blows," Reed says. "How they respond is a really interesting question."

At the venerable SAP, which has made billions from traditional Big ERP installations, the future of ERP commenced with the tacit realization that change was inevitable and good--for both the company and its customers. (As for shareholders, we'll get to that later.) "Enterprise software is going through a transformation in a very significant way," says Philip Say, vice president for SAP Business Suite. Themes that SAP has embraced in framing its own future of ERP include: clarity, innovation, enhancements without disruption, and timeless software.

"In one respect, and this is clearly a response to customer need and desires, [the future of ERP] is about the simplification of it," Say contends. "These systems are highly mission-critical, and these can be difficult to implement and manage. [At SAP], there's a world of activity to make consumption, investment and deployment easier and ultimately make usage of software by end user easier."

Don't buy Say's or any other Big ERP vendor's "Yes We Can" change rhetoric? In fact, SAP is challenging the "conventional thinking" around ERP, including the outdated acronym itself, according to Say. "It's ironic: We're so invested in the notion of ERP, yet we're challenging the definition itself at SAP. I think it's radically changing," he says. "The classic perception is that these are finance, HR, back-office, classic stuff and that's it. I challenge that definition, because when I see operations and how customers are using [enterprise software], they're not doing it in that way any more."

The "Single Global Instance" Dream Dies

One ERP System: a single, global instance of business software applications running our entire business and our business lines, seamlessly uniting our CRM, supply chain and business analytics applications. Efficiencies. Integration. Savings. Fewer headaches.

That's been the dream at many companies and for CIOs since Y2K--a dream most often fed to them by eager ERP vendors. Just read this excerpt from a 2003 article in CIO:

Bill McDermott, president and CEO of SAP America, stares out the tinted glass wall overlooking the bustling convention floor and then dives into the same pitch he gives the pilgrimaging executives [at SAP's Sapphire event]. "You have ERP," says SAP America's CEO. "The next step is to expand it to CRM and the supply chain." The idea, he says, is to control all the data in a company by standardizing on one system for the front end and using one data source for the back. His pitch reaches its climax when McDermott sounds the message SAP has been trumpeting all week:
It's time to move to a single instance.
In other words, McDermott is telling CIOs to forget the multiple systems their companies use today, rip them out, and replace them with one ERP system--with one data store--that serves the entire company, no matter how diversified or geographically spread out it is. That, he says, is how to get the most bang for your IT buck.

That dream has now faded for many companies. Even at SAP. "I think the concept is evolving," Say contends. "There's a pretty open acknowledgement that--is it practical to get to a single instance across all functions of a very large, global enterprise? No. That's not a realistic goal any more. We're living in a world where multiple systems have to be networked together, have to communicate openly with each other and need to have sophisticated enough infrastructures on top so that the business can manage it."

The "more evolved" thinking, Say suggests, is this: Companies can achieve consistencies and efficiencies in their business processes without having to use one singular system that manages the entire landscape.

Accenture's Hayes says that for many--but not all--companies, the pursuit of the single instance is a dream that hasn't come true. "The homogenous dream was a great dream, and I think the industry has helped clients move toward the dream," he says. "But like a lot of things you dreamed, it didn't turn out all that you had hoped, and therefore you modify your dream." (He notes, though, that it's not impossible for companies to get to a global, single instance; Accenture has with its ERP system, he points out.) Hayes is emphatic, however, that companies not return to the days of "crazy spaghetti code, heterogeneous systems, unsynchronized data and all that came along with it."

So what's the future fix? A "happy middle," Hayes offers, which takes advantage of new advances in middleware offerings, tools from the big vendors that allow easy integration between core databases and infrastructure, and SaaS apps where appropriate. He calls it harmonization.

All these capabilities become even more critical in the future. First, many companies are soon to be facing "to upgrade or not" questions as time continues to run out on their antiquated ERP systems: Do they stick with their PeopleSoft, R/3, eBusiness Suite, JDE or other aged ERP versions inching closer to losing support from the vendors (and, conceivably go off that vendor's maintenance and support services, moving to a third-party); or take the plunge on a new and different ERP package, such as a cloud-based or open-source suite? Second, M&As are going to be on the rise as credit starts flowing again, and the ERP systems of those companies making the deals and those being dealt must be "nimble and responsive to change in business conditions," Hayes points out.

Crispin Read, general manager of marketing for Microsoft Dynamics ERP, which targets midsize organizations, points to a trend he calls "hub and spoke" deployments: Companies use Oracle or SAP ERP suites as the central system of record, and off of that use smaller app packages, like Dynamics, in the subsidiaries, plants and various operating units of the larger company. "It's not new," Read says, "but we're seeing a lot more companies doing this." The rationale: A smaller, Tier II system is much cheaper and faster to deploy than force-feeding Big ERP software down on the smaller properties of the company that most likely don't need the associated horsepower or headaches.

"With ERP, you can't do a one-size-fits-all," Read says. "The corporate office of a $10 billion organization just has different needs than the local operations in Australia. And if you try to deploy [SAP or Oracle] everywhere, you're effectively going to be deploying an enterprise solution in a midmarket company, and the costs are going to explode."

Could there be a resurgence in "best of breed" app strategies for vertical-specific business areas--whether that's on-premise or in the cloud--without all the integration headaches of yore? AMR Research Chief Research Officer Bruce Richardson thinks so. "The Burger King approach--'have it your way' with SaaS, on-premise, BPO," Richardson says, "is going to force vendors like SAP, Oracle and Infor to get very aggressive in offering other deployment models."

The Cloud Rolls In, Fast

Call it what you will: software-as-a-service, on-demand computing, Web-based software, cloud computing. Doesn't matter, because business software experienced via an Internet connection and browser is already here. Resistance is futile, stupid and short-sighted. At this point, however, no one (save for the SaaS vendors, perhaps) is advocating for wholesale rip and replaces of on-premise ERP installs.

But as enthusiasm for traditional, on-premise, expensive and complicated software deployments wanes even further, Web-based software options hosted in either public or private clouds will become even more attractive for companies big and small looking for low costs and easily consumed apps, analysts say. (For the record, it appears that cloud computing is taking over the as the catch-all buzzword, but what's cloud-based and what isn't largely depends on which vendor you are speaking with--Salesforce.com is a self-described "Enterprise Cloud Computing Company"; NetSuite, a "Web-Based Business Software Suite" provider, and they have nearly identical businesses.)

"The supervendors have architected enormous complexity in order to be able to sell across so many different verticals, in so many industries," says AMR's Richardson. "I think there's a need for simplicity, and the Salesforce.com and Workday people get that." (Even Oracle and SAP have finally realized that, though those ships are slower and costlier to turn around--see: Business ByDesign saga and Oracle's indecisiveness.)

Jim McGeever, the CFO of NetSuite, pays homage to Google for sticking to its uncomplicated homepage when the search world was morphing into portals in the late 1990s. Google's success is, in part, a validation that easy to use, intuitive Web apps are critical to the future of ERP, McGeever contends. NetSuite's "anytime, anywhere access" mantra is the manifestation of the 11-year-old vendor's strategy that embraces UI simplification.

By the end of 2009, Gartner forecasts that global SaaS revenue will reach $7.5 billion, which is an 18 percent increase from 2008 revenue of $6.4 billion. For SaaS ERP apps, in particular, Gartner projected a small increase in worldwide revenues: from $1.17 billion to $1.24 billion in 2009. "Adoption of the on-demand deployment model has continued to grow as on-demand vendors have extended their services through alliances, partner offerings, and more recently, by offering and promoting user application development through platform as a service (PaaS) capabilities," noted Sharon Mertz, research director at Gartner, in a report. "Although usage and adoption is still evolving, deployment of SaaS still varies between the enterprise application markets and within specific market segments because of buyer demand and applicability of the solution." Looking out even farther, Gartner predicts that the SaaS market will show consistent growth through 2013 when global SaaS revenue will total more than $14 billion for the enterprise software markets.

SaaS vendors have had to fight the niche product label from the get-go; AMR's Richardson says the perception is that "SaaS guys continue to nibble at the edges." It's likely that they will have to wage even more fierce battles in the future, according to data from market researcher Saugatuck Technology. Despite continued and sizable investments in SaaS development and adoption around the world, SaaS "will not become the primary IT standard and practice by year-end 2012," notes the report, "An Endless Cycle of Innovation." Instead, notes the report, SaaS will be viewed primarily as an important "agent of change" through this period. Two years from then, in 2014, is when Saugatuck predicts big change: "SaaS will become integral to infrastructure, business systems, operations and development within all aspects of user firms, with variations in status and roles based on region and business culture."

The research houses are equally bullish on cloud computing's future: David Cappuccio, Gartner's chief of research for the infrastructure teams, ranked it as one of the top trends affecting companies' technology use during the next five years. IDC's cloud services revenue forecast jumps from $17.4 billion in 2009 to $44.2 billion in 2013.

All projections and speculation are subject to change without notice, of course, but once loyal on-premise companies get a taste of SaaS and cloud-based services, they typically come back for seconds, however small a bite it may seem to the Big ERP vendors, analysts say. NetSuite's McGeever boasts that the vendor "gets more incremental revenue from selling to our installed base than we do from new business." (See 5 Questions with NetSuite's CFO.)

Converts are proclaiming their newfound faith more and more. Todd Pierce, CIO of Genentech, a $13 billion San Francisco-based biotech company, among other initiatives, purchased a Google Apps suite for 18,000 accounts and has moved ERP functionality to iPhone apps. In an interview with Abbie Lundberg (former CIO magazine editor-in-chief), Pierce offers a convincing overview of the huge savings, benefits and "revolutionary" usability factors that Genentech has experienced by moving enterprise software apps to Web-based and cloud computing software-delivery models.

"There are many things happening here that are good for users, good for the IT profession, good for business. It's just good, good, good," Pierce says. "You know, what's slowing this adoption are all the priests of the past--all the preservationists. All the interests that are built up around the edifice that is enterprise software.... Cloud computing is a dream come true."