There seems to be a piece of the puzzle missing from the conventional wisdom amassing about the relative states of ERP, cloud computing, and the future of technology. One camp gleefully trumpets the opinion that ERP is no longer relevant to anything, and we should all be heading off into different cloud applications. Another contingent says ERP cloud computing is on the rise and will soon dominate that space. Still another group contends that purchasing software is so 20th century; we are now a subscription culture, signing up for products and services tailored to suit us individually. We lease our cars, we stream our media, we use phone apps to build our own radio stations.
These trends are being announced by technologists, whose relative prosperity rises and falls with their ability to convince organizations to buy their products. But at the end of all of the posturing and enthusiasm for the latest and greatest, where is the voice of the transaction-based businesses who paid for ERP originally?