ERP and Cloud-Computing: Making Upgrades and Innovation Easier
The traditional sentiment of what it takes to implement enterprise resource planning (ERP) and similar large, complex packaged applications is that it’s a big, lumbering, exhaustive process. Standard procedures such as installation, configuration, testing new systems and then moving them into production can take enormous time and effort, and software changes often just layer on more complexity.
Could cloud-computing change that reputation? Cloud-computing lifts the perspective of software as a service (SaaS) to the business level where concerns about scale, performance and availability are seen through the lens of business processes and user requirements.
Recent user reactions from the CUE-10 conference in San Antonio made it clear that cloud computing will have a significant impact on ERP. The primary reason is obvious: greater deployment flexibility, enabling organizations to tighten the alignment between business strategy and the technology needed to achieve it.
With cloud-based ERP, customers have the option to subscribe to applications through the cloud and then if they wish, take their investment in both money and experience and apply it to a standard perpetual license, while remaining on the cloud platform. Organizations can easily test new application services; if it works, they keep using it, if not they can just switch over to another vendor.
Rather than offering a brand new but limited SaaS system, Lawson Software is providing its full existing suite of enterprise applications in the cloud, including M3 for process management, S3 for service management and its Talent Management application. Lawson’s External Cloud Services run exclusively on the Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform.
By providing a single point of management for working with all virtual appliances, Lawson Software’s “Cloud Console” is critical to their desire to steer clear of the debate about SaaS and the use of a multi-tenancy model.
Lawson is demonstrating how cloud computing, virtualization and innovative management tools can help loosen up ERP’s infamous inflexibility allowing organizations move closer to the goal of letting business requirements and strategies guide decisions about the size and make-up of enterprise applications.
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