Special technology report ERP
Turner. He continued: “CloudCompute infrastructure is built on the Vblock Infrastructure platform from VCE, The Virtual Computing Environment company. Vblock integrates the leading virtualisation software, networking, security, computing, storage and management technologies from industry leaders Cisco, EMC and VMware. CSC's partnership with VCE enables the economic model that is unique to BizCloud.”
Capex adversity According to Martin Perry, managing director of K3’s Managed Services, there is an increasing level of comfort as to what SaaS is and can offer. “Ultimately, people will decide what is
on an externally hosted platform or on premise system.” He also explains that physical servers, storage and bandwidth cost borne by customer with on-premise deployment disappear in a SaaS model. Turner commented that CSC is seeing a growing interest in the Cloud concept and has recently launched CSC BizCloud, an on- premise private Cloud billed as a service. “BizCloud is expected to accelerate the adoption of a private Cloud by businesses and government agencies because it eliminates long-lead times for implementation and the need to budget for capital investment,” he said.
BizCloud features CloudCompute, CSC’s new Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) architecture, which is deployed in the CSC Trusted Cloud Datacentres. “CloudCompute delivers computer, storage and network resources as a service to support any application, and is especially capable for hosting mission critical and business critical workloads,” explained
16
MANUFACTURING &LOGISTICS
IT March 2011
the most appropriate delivery model for their business,” he said, “but more and more the market is becoming comfortable with considering SaaS as an option; even if the end choice is the traditional option.” Perry believes the main reason for this is that businesses are more capex adverse than ever before. Also, he observes that an increasing number of companies are unable to predict user numbers on short-, medium- and long- term bases, so Saas offers flexibility with cost and use. “Businesses MDs are reluctant to invest large amounts in complex hardware to run applications on a premise that they will have to be scrapped in five years,” he said. “A lot of customers didn’t realise SaaS was an option for them, perhaps aided by the fact that a lot of ERP suppliers were/are reluctant to offer a SaaS version. There are some products out there which started as SaaS applications that are thin in functionality. Forward-thinking and established vendors should offer a full version of their product in the Cloud.”
For Fleming, the emergence and growing acceptance of On Demand or Cloud ERP one of the most exciting trends in the ERP space. “Companies are looking for effective ERP solutions without the difficulty of management, and now are deploying full-strength ERP, like QAD Enterprise Applications in the Cloud,” he said. Fleming pointed out that over the past decade, QAD has seen the reduction in cost and the increase in availability of telecommunications combined with a more pragmatic mind set from Chief Information Officers (CIO) to accept SaaS. “The era of the IT empire is dying, and the modern CIO is one who is focused on the needs of the company and aligning with the business,” he remarked. “The growing acceptance of Cloud ERP is beginning to change the mind set of ERP users. While we at QAD do not see all ERP in the Cloud, we do expect that most ERP will tend to be served to customers in this way in only a few years’ time.” Fleming believes there are many drivers for this, but the principle ones are the need for agility in deployment of systems and the focus of IT in becoming business enablers. “IT managers want to be able to serve the needs of customers faster,” said Fleming.
Orme feels that although some modern products are ‘Cloud-enabled’ there has been minimal uptake of the SaaS model within the ERP marketplace so far. “Other areas of IT have obviously seen a big increase in SaaS adoption,” he said, “but reluctance from certain business areas (most notably Finance) have led to a slower adoption of SaaS based ERP.” Orme added that there have been perceived issues around data security, accessibility and speed. “Most of these perceptions are based around doubts about the infrastructure rather than issues with the ERP software itself,” he said. “In the future as companies implement more modern infrastructures, adoption of cloud based ERP will increase as the apprehensions decrease.”
Caution According to Burgess, SaaS and Cloud uptake is limited to early adopters and additional systems that feed into ERP, ie. CRM and expense management. “Businesses
www.logisticsit.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56