Moving ERP's to the cloud was a way to minimize the negative financial impact of making an "upfront" purchase. However, it did nothing for Operations. For nearly two decades, Operations have been held hostage by ERP's. http://www.babblewareinc.com/index.php/archives/category/history

ERP's were built and sold to the Finance and IT departments under the premise of consolidated financials and one throat to choke, respectively. The track record of these applications, however, is less than impressive. Companies did receive their consolidated financials and there is one throat to choke - unfortunately it is the customers throat that is being choked as Operations was left wanting.

So they move it to the cloud to make it sting less when you buy the application. The cloud is nothing new, either. It goes back 40 years to time share computing on for rent, large mainframes. But an ERP in the cloud has the same negative effects on Operations. In fact, it can be worse because in the cloud you have no opportunity to modify the application to meet your Operations. In the old, terrestrial model, at least you could decide to spend millions of dollars and waste months or years modifying the application to attempt to fit your business. In the cloud, what they have is what you get.

Operations, and the "blue collar" workers that make, store, sell, distribute, deliver, install and service everything that makes consumer life comfortable and industrial life profitable need dynamic solutions that change at the speed of business. Customer compliance, federal regulations, expanding geographic markets, new products, acquisitions/mergers, competitors, margin pressure and other such significant shifts occur all the time in business. Operations feels the need to change in their process, data and technology but the ERP choking their business can't change. So work arounds, spreadsheets, missed opportunity and penalites abound.

The popularity of cloud based ERP's has to do with the "mess" the earth bound solutions cause. However, moving it to the cloud does nothing to mitigate the negative, errosive effects they have on your business.