ERP innovation: SAP, Microsoft lead the way

By Jon Franke, News Editor 14 Jun 2007 | Source: http://searchsap.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid21_gci1260823,00.html?track=NL-137&ad=591560&asrc=EM_NLN_1588144&uid=6220928

Quote:

“After a down period, ERP innovation is back. And it’s being led by a couple of industry giants: SAP and Microsoft.

The frenzied consolidation that gripped the enterprise resource planning (ERP) market in recent years is by no means complete, but as customers demand better usability and flexibility, and easier access to their data, the light of innovation has once again begun to shine, according to a recent Forrester Research study.

“Consolidation does make innovation difficult,” said Paul Hamerman, vice president of enterprise applications at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester, “because [companies] that have absorbed a lot of ERP vendors over the past couple years [have to] go through a lot of product rationalization, salesforce rationalization [and] overhead rationalization. So it does tend to distract companies from building software.”

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