Apps on Tap
Kevin Maney's tech column in the June 23 USA Today focuses on the huge, expensive, complex nature of ERP. From that article:
"Consulting companies love to recommend systems that can only be installed and explained by hordes of consultants working under contracts that run for longer than the time between Star Wars movies.
Next, though, the ERP companies are going to face a new kind of competitor. 'Apps on tap,' is how Mark Templeton, CEO of Citrix Systems, describes them. They are simpler, more focused, more modular versions of ERP-style software, accessed over the Internet and perhaps totally managed by an outside company such as U. S. Internetworking.
Such software costs less, can be quickly rearranged and can work with the Web. And it doesn't make those who use it go 'erp!'
It could be the undoing of the SAPs and Peoplesofts and their ilk, says Claton Christensen, author of The Innovator's Dillemma. 'Big enterprise software systems like SAP have way overshot the market,' he says. 'You see people who have invested so much to implement these and then use only a fraction of the functionality.'
It's a classic set-up for getting up-ended by a so-called disruptive technology, just the way mainframe computers got undercut by PCs."
A classic disruptive technology. Hmmmmm.
--Mike Buckley |
