A moment of silence for ERP.
Much has been discussed about SAP’s pending $3.4B acquisition of SuccessFactors, and now Oracle’s $1.9 billion deal to buy Taleo. Rightly, SAP and Oracle have been praised for trying to bolster their cloud offerings with these moves. But, in a few years, I wonder if it will really matter. Because, while SAP and Oracle are obviously trying to get with the times by offering their services via the cloud, it may be too late. Why? Because, in short, ERP — enterprise resource planning software — is on its deathbed. Read the rest of the Forbes magazine guest post written by Tien Tzuo, founder and CEO of Zuora.
From Ned Lilly, President and CEO of xTuple, in the comments:
"Please. This article should have been called 'The End of First-Generation ERP Systems from the 1970s.' There are plenty of modern ERP systems — including my company’s (www.xTuple.com), which are both available as a subscription service themselves, and also provide users the ability to track all the customer and services-based information Mr. Tzuo references. This whole article is a silly attempt to plug Mr. Tzuo’s company by picking a fight with a nonexistent straw man. I suppose if I had created a business that made flying broomsticks, and was trying to convince everyone to buy my product, I might declare the End of Automobiles, and the birth of the Quidditch Economy. But that doesn’t mean I’d be right, and I’d certainly expect magazines like Forbes to know the difference."
More musings and snark on the ever-shrinking world of business software — and how open source can be part of the solution at The ERP Graveyard Blog.
Ned Lilly
In October 2001, Ned co-founded xTuple, originally called OpenMFG, with the aim of bringing the worlds of open platform software and enterprise resource planning (ERP) together to solve the unmet needs of small- to mid-sized manufacturers. In 1999, he was a co-founder of Great Bridge, an early business built around the PostgreSQL database which is also the core technology for xTuple today. Great Bridge was incubated inside Landmark Communications, a mid-sized media company where Ned directed corporate venture investments, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and startup activity. Prior to Landmark, Ned worked for a regional technology group in Washington D.C. and had a brief first career in political media — television, radio and a non-partisan news wire. He holds a B.A. from the University of Virginia and an M.A. from George Washington University.