Enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors are moving fast to position themselves as suppliers of complete e-business solutions that stress the importance of streamlining interactions with partners and customers as much as they do lifting internal efficiencies.
That`s according to Oracle SA`s applications pre-sales manager, Dave Brennan, who says rise of the Internet as a medium for doing business has prompted enterprises to re-evaluate their expectations of enterprise applications.
In Brennan`s opinion, the applications of the future will face outward and give the enterprise`s customers, suppliers and other trusted partners access into the business. The traditional ERP back-office systems will provide companies the base infrastructure on which they can build customer relationship management, supply chain management, and business intelligence systems.
"The solution that Oracle offers is a complete e-business package that stretches from the enterprise backbone (the traditional financial, manufacturing, HR, and modules) through to CRM, SCM and business intelligence.
"All of these modules and applications are fully-integrated and completely architectured for the Internet. In the world of e-business, integration is everything: it provides the platform for the sharing of information, and streamlining of the supply chain, as well as customer relationship management and self-service applications.
"Without fully integrated systems, companies will not be able to increase their profitability or reduce their costs. The best-of-breed approach leads to painful and expensive integration projects, increases the cost of ownership for the enterprise applications environment, and reduces the organisation`s ability to capitalise on the benefits of e-business."
ERP vendors such as Oracle are bringing out packages for vertical markets that simultaneously require less tailoring, while being easier to customise; and the technology underpinning ERP packages has become simpler, more open, and geared for Web-deployment.
"In a world that moves at Internet speed, customers no longer have time for long implementation cycles. We believe that any systems implementation should start delivering returns in 90 days. Enterprise applications have become more modular and flexible to help customers gain a rapid return on their investments."
Brennan says that in Oracle`s view, IT infrastructure will move away from the chaos of distributed computing towards a more centralised model over the next few years.
Consolidation of data centres, databases and applications at one central point will facilitate sharing of information throughout the enterprise, as well as help companies to reduce the costs of owning, maintaining, and upgrading their applications.
"Users will access applications through Web browsers, and companies will only have to install, maintain, and manage one instance of their applications at a central server. This also gives users, customers, and business partners the ability to tap into the enterprise`s applications anytime, any place and through any device," says Brennan.
Brennan also notes that scalability and availability are more important now than they ever were before. Systems in the Internet world simply can not go down, at any time of the day, which means that maintenance and upgrading needs to take place in the background while the applications continue to run and deliver the same level of performance to internal and external users.
"E-businesses - whether they are business-to-consumer e-commerce sites or companies that tap into the global network for supply chain management and Internet procurement - also need systems that can scale up to cater for rapid growth in transactions," adds Brennan.
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