The Trend Of Enterprise Information Systems

Small, medium, and micro enterprises (SMB) opting for cloud ERP services, especially for those without IT personnel, is justified.

image from geralt at Pixabay

Those who claim “cloud information systems services expose enterprise customers to security hazards” can not answer the following simple questions:

• Do enterprises have absolute confidence that their own IT personnel will never leak enterprises’ business information?
• Are enterprises absolutely sure that on-premises software vendors will never steal their customers’ business information?
• Can on-premises software vendors timely customize ERP applications for SMB?
• Can on-premises software vendors reduce the overall IT cost, which particularly includes IT personnel salaries, to under the level affordable to SMB?
• Did on-premises software vendors honestly tell their SMB customers, “Your enterprise data will permanently gone if your hard drive crash”? Even if SMB does make backups of their database by themselves, who will restore the backup after the crash? Is there any guarantee that the restoration will always succeed and the on-premise system will always roll back to full production run after the database restoration?
• Do you worry very much for saving your money in small banks?

Enterprise decision makers can easily draw, on the basis of elementary cost and risk analysis, the following concrete instead of abstract conclusion for their information systems strategies:

• It is more beneficial for SMB to subscribe cloud ERP services than to buy on-premises ERP software.
• It is more beneficial for large enterprises to buy on-premises ERP software than to subscribe cloud information systems services.

Information systems providers’ lack of decent technology is the major obstacle that slows down their paces of offering enterprise information systems services on cloud.

• Some of them have materialized their cloud information systems services with multiple tenancies trait.
• Few of them can materialize their cloud information systems services with the trait of multiple industries (a single instance of running server software supporting multiple information systems, and even serving enterprises in multiple distinct industries).

1. Some of them have materialized their cloud information systems services with single developer (only the vendor itself is allowed to customize its information systems), as known as “customers lock-in”.
2. Few of them can materialize their cloud information systems services with the trait of multiple developers (IT individuals and teams from the globe joining vendor’s PaaS platform to run their own SaaS businesses), which gives customers the rights of free choices.

• Many of them have successfully locked enterprise customers in their cloud information systems services by squeezing customers’ growth space.
• Rare, if not zero, cloud information systems services providers allow their cloud subscribers to switch to on-premises software customers after these enterprises grow and decide to manage their own information systems by their own IT teams.

1. A few cloud vendors have just recently been able to roll out their immature business information systems PaaS platforms and started to allure software programmers to develop business information systems applications on their platforms. Most of those platforms came along with tough technical barriers, namely proprietary programming languages, tools, databases, back-end server black boxes, and development environments, only to scare global IT talents away from partnering up with these PaaS vendors.
2. Few PaaS platforms provide the lowest technology entry threshold for IT talents with minimal open source software knowledge to develop high quality enterprise information systems.

My predictions of enterprise information systems industry’s evolution follow.

1. The majority of SMB will eventually embrace cloud information systems services, sooner or later.
2. Large enterprises will continue to buy on-premises ERP software, or to develop them by themselves.
3. The job opportunities for IT technicians working for enterprise software vendors will be reduced and thus many of them will become employees or third-party developers of the cloud vendors aforementioned in 1.
4. The job opportunities for IT technicians working for SMB will be reduced and thus many of them will be employed by large enterprises aforementioned in 2.
5. More enterprise software vendors will follow suit Tera Rows, which has been providing decent cloud enterprise information systems services to SMB since 2016.

Originally published at https://www.terarows.com.