The business navigation enabled by enterprise resource planning software provides a major competitive boost. How will these applications change in the years ahead? Drew Robb reports.

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A decade ago, enterprise resource planning (ERP) was the panacea for all enterprise ills (remember Y2K?). There were even several magazines devoted to the subject. But they all went away in the 2000-2002 tech downturn as the ERP hype died down. Despite the diminished hype, ERP has quietly cemented its place as a mission-critical enterprise application.

So where does the ERP market stand today? Several trends are emerging, led by the growing importance of customer relationship management (CRM) and business intelligence.

Top ERP Trends

1. CRM Leads the Way

With companies still very concerned about budgets and ROI, this spells good news for CRM. Many ERP purchases are fronted by CRM, said Eric Kimberling, president of Panorama Consulting Group. The reason: It is a lot easier to demonstrate value for money for CRM packages that will directly increase sales.

"Many realize that the only way to make it out of the recession stronger is to fuel top-line growth and sales, and most will do so without hiring too many new sales and customer service reps," said Kimberling. "For this reason, companies will look to CRM applications to help make their existing sales and customer service functions more effective and efficient."

2. Business Intelligence Follows

Just as CRM benefits from a general rise in interest in ERP, so too will business intelligence. Kimberling sees this manifesting in more focus on diagnostics and analytics.

"Companies have reduced their margins of error for missteps during the recession, so they will continue to rely on ERP systems to provide operational data to make more informed decisions," he said. "Look for diagnostics, analytics, and business intelligence applications to gain momentum in the coming year."

Craig Himmelberger, director of marketing for SAP's Business Suite, concurs.

"Access to business information for decision-making purposes is more and more critical and valuable, as will be supporting business analytics to create information out of data," Himmelberger said.

3. ERP Market Stratification

In the roaring nineties, it seemed like there were hundreds of vendors in the ERP space. Many were relatively small outfits serving narrow verticals. What a difference a few years makes. These days, there are a few recognized players at the pinnacle as well as a smaller group of competitors in general.

"The big guys are SAP, Oracle and Microsoft," said Kimberling. "But there are a number of up and comers such as Netsuite for smaller organizations, along with Tier II solutions in the SMB space such as Plex, Deacom, Epicor, Syspro and IFS, all examples of very strong and viable solutions."

According to Gartner, the top five vendors in the $20 billion ERP market are SAP, Oracle, Sage, Infor and Microsoft.

Read the rest at eCRMguide.