Meeting demands

The continuing trend in ERP seems to be for the 'value' end of the market, unless there is significant financial justification to opt for the traditional 'high-end' vendors with the attendant relatively high implementation costs.

That said, there is also a need — with limited delivery — for 'on-demand' ERP/CRM services. According to Simon Bragg, European research director at

: 'There is a noticeable trend towards multi-tenanted, on-demand solutions. Plexus (www.plex.com) has such an ERP solution, while SAP has announced its CRM solution via a partnership with IBM, and there have been announcements from Oracle and web-native hosted salesforce.com.'

Dan Roberts, senior consultant at

agrees. 'There is not a lot of excitement in the ERP world these days. In some ways, that in itself is a refreshing change, after the e-commerce hype and Y2K. Then SAP and Oracle decided they would dominate CRM and SCM, which they have. There has also been some movement in the 'software as a service' (SaaS) scene, but it's a slow take-up, rather than a flood. There's salesforce.com in CRM and a few supply chain players using IBM's On Demand solution,' he said.