What new at "cloud" ERP?

Brian Sommer, the CEO of TechVentive company, considers that ERP systems in property will seriously yield a position to ERP in the nearest future in "cloud" which number constantly grows, and the functionality of such products becomes deeper.

On Dreamforce 2011, the annual Salesforce.com conference, a number of announcements of cloud ERP solutions was made. Within the conference the community of analysts also discussed products of other suppliers of cloud ERP who did not take part in an action, but also are the innovation.

According to Brian Sommer, there is a set of cloud solutions of such, deserving attention and components serious competitive environment for traditional ERP applications. Their short description is included below.

Kenandy. This new solution. The difference of approach of this company is that it creates ERP solutions taking into account versatile vision of business – as inside, and beyond its limits (instead of normal - in production walls). In a packet of the company a number of appendices for automation of sales and production is had now. Integration of financial software will be implemented by means of a cloud product of the third firm, perhaps FinancialForce.com.

RootStock. This company has quite solid discrete production solution which is integrated with financial software from NetSuite. A system works with PaaS (platform as service) NS-BOS from NetSuite. This week RootStock announced a release of the new version of the product integrated with PaaS from Force.com (Salesforce.com). That RootStock becomes one of two largest PaaS-platforms for the commercial software. In an ecosystem of Force.com RootStock it will be integrated with other cloud financial software, but it can be close and it is directly connected with CRM-applications from FinancialForce.com and Salesforce.com.

Infor. The CEO of Infor Chuck Phillips reported that the vendor works on expansion of data from/in Infor MRP/ERP for CRM applicaitons from Salesforce.com. The company will make these data available to architecture of Force.com. It will help to save labor power and also will become a harbinger of other joint developments of Infor and Salesforce.com.

Workday. The codirector of Workday company Aneel Bhusri and his team of managers last Monday held a friendly meeting for analysts. In a conversation they explained how Workday works with massive amounts of data, processes big data sets and so on. These are those questions which suppliers of cloud ERP should consider if applications should service large enterprises surely.

Other, known solution providers SaaS ERP do not stand still too.

NetSuite continues to maintain functionality of the product line, and Plex Systems (the full-size cloud ERP solution), by hearsay, will add multiple additional functionality to products of the company.

SAP. This company has BusinessByDesign, and, appear, this product is promoted as the corporate level, auxiliary for solutions. However the expert explained that the company added in the solution a set of functionality for the solution of business questions of subsidiary companies and also different problems which small and medium business faces.

Acumatica. This company will make several big statements next week that should give it a bigger weight in the market of cloud ERP.

VAI added new computing features for automation of sales and social interaction in the system recently. VAI uses a set of cloud technology developments of IBM.