Cloud ERP Forecast: Up, Up and Away

Cloud ERP began as a twinkle in the eye in the late 1990s with the promise of enabling businesses to run faster and smarter over the web. That promise is today being realized on a global scale, with phenomenal growth in the cloud solutions market that’s outpacing the IT industry as a whole by a large margin.

The momentum behind the cloud is only accelerating as organizations look for an alternative to Stone Age on-premise software and servers that drag down business performance with disjointed processes, multi-vendor patchworks and high IT costs. As a proven solution, cloud services technology is fast moving beyond its roots in the small and mid-market to adoption by Fortune 500 enterprises.

Consider some recent analyst data:

• IDC predicts that worldwide public IT cloud services spending will grow at a 26.4% compound annual rate—five times the IT industry at large—between 2012 and 2016, nearing $100 billion. IDC defines public IT cloud services as offerings geared for the unrestricted open market and comprising applications, systems infrastructure software, platform as a service, servers and basic storage.[1]

• Gartner forecasts that cloud-based business application services spending will grow at a 19.5% compound annual rate, from $13.5 billion in 2011 to $32.8 billion in 2016.[2]

• Gartner expects that the percentage of CRM applications delivered in a software as a service (SaaS) model will grow from 35% in 2012 to more than 50% by 2016.[3]

Cloud ERP has come a long way since NetSuite pioneered the space with its founding in 1998. As quantifiable business value realized by thousands of customers continues to drive global momentum, the cloud is the limit.