Cloud ERP Forecasts: Better than you think

Cloud ERP is here to stay, but how much can we expect it to grow? Recently the research firm Gartner came up with some estimates for the coming decade. According to it, 47% of the organizations were planning to migrate to cloud within five years. At the same time, though, 30% of the companies said they’d like to retain control and use an on-premises system. However, many experts are of the opinion that the actual growth is very likely to beat these estimates by a huge margin. They reason that as cloud is still far from its maturity peak, its impact potential is not fully understood.

There might be certain truth in this point of view, looking at the way systems are rapidly moving to the cloud. Here’s why it’s reasonable to expect explosive growth in cloud-based ERP in the days to come:

• Full-scale integration: Legacy applications exist in silos, with specialized systems for different tasks. In the modern context, this represents a huge challenge when information has to flow fast and accurately. Cloud ERP accomplishes this much faster, and is therefore witnessing fast adoption.
• Flexible supply chains: With cloud computing, it has now become possible to make the entire supply chain mobile and highly optimized. Also, cloud-based analytics tools can help eliminating wastage and move towards lean supply chain much faster.
• Big data: And then, of course, one has to factor in the massive disruption spawned by big data itself. While analytics has played a vital role before also, with big data it takes on a whole new meaning, redefining system capability and network security.

It is certainly true that cloud wins because of the low cost hands down, but that is the least of its advantages. It’s the unprecedented business potential and efficiency of cloud ERP that will drive growth in the near future.