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To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (25148)	5/22/2000 1:13:00 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Respond to of 54805

Here's my vision of the future of ERP: And just how far out were you looking? The scenario you paint happens today ... just not very often and with many different sub-plots, including support from the primary vendor or support from a partner. But, there are going to be in-house IT shops with us for a long time, for better or worse. From the articles I've read, most of SAP's customers would be willing to put up with the high cost of implementing R/3, but the time it takes to set it up, and then customize it (an ongoing process) is way too long. Time = cost. If it didn't require all that training, modification, planning, fixing, etc., then it wouldn't be expensive to implement. ERP vendors are already under pressure to cut implementation costs and improve the quality of fit of their product, which implies tailoring to the individual business. If one is a SAP, one can get away with this being very expensive and still make sales. What surprises me is how high risk it is with SAP and yet even that doesn't seem to have hit them that hard. What I see as new in this area is the pressures which the Internet creates. This includes heightened expectations about interconnections with suppliers and customers, potentially drastic scalability issues, increased motivation for distributed deployment, and legacy integration issues with new web applications, and just plain old being in a hurry, but more so because of how fast things happen in e-Space.

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (25148)	5/22/2000 2:31:00 PM
From: Mike 2.0	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Jacob, as Thomas mentioned already, it is certainly possible now to outsource IT support for an R/3 system. But the real value for ERP customers isn't to merely "have one throat to choke" by bringing in an EDS, Arthur Andersen or similar to struggle with R/3 instead of a hired IT employees, but to "rent" the ERP system itself from an ASP. Qwest's Cyber.Solutions group does exactly this for R/3 for example. I do question their choice of R/3 as being a viable choice "for the masses" unless you are willing to accept a rigid standard R/3 system. However, the ERP vendor whose name seems to come up most often in ERP-as-ASP discussion is JE Edwards (JDEC). AFAIK their new OneWorld system is not nearly as user-, net-, and implementation-hostile as R/3. I attended an ASP seminar/show some months back and most of the ERP vendor buzz centered around hosting JDE OneWorld. I do not remember SAP mentioned anytime in a meaningful way. In fact JDEC is hosting its own s/w as its own ASP. Also JDEC is in the lead IMHO as far as partnering with best-of-breed partners (Siebel, etc.) versus succombing to a "not invented here" syndrome so prevalent in SAP and ORCL as well. All this said I should add I have a small position in JDEC at 12 1/8. I have no interest in SAP as an investment.