I was recently chatting with someone, and they asked me if I had heard of a company called RAMCO ERP. I hadn’t, so I took at their website. It’s quite an impressive landscape they offer, and it’s totally on the cloud. They appear to have taken the pain out the transactions. They allow you to email in a request, and convert it (much like an Idoc) into a transaction. They focus being adaptive, totally cloud based and obviously mobile. So this begs the question, if they already have this platform up and running (and according to what I read in their website they do), is SAP too late to the party???
Well, the obvious answer to the question is, “it depends”. Being a consultant, I still love this answer, because it’s usually true. So, here is how I see it. If you are a new enterprise and you have the choice between a solution built in the cloud, for the cloud, adaptive to the business and more, or you could just the industry giant that was built on-premise, and is moving that large system to the cloud… who would you choose? Now, I love SAP. I wouldn’t be where I am today without their software, but I’d choose the cloud in a heartbeat and here’s why. If I’m a small business, I want a small footprint, I want easy transaction strings, I want everything configurable, and want things to look nice… not like the 1970’s gray screen that’s been cleaned up. Now, let’s look at the flip side of this question. I’m a company that already uses SAP, but I want to roll things out to my smaller divisions, well, I would clearly stick with what I know. It already manages the rest of my business and want everything to communicate seamlessly.
So, I guess the answer is that SAP isn’t too late to the party… but they hurry up and get there before all the cake is gone. Companies like RAMCO have the opportunity to really cash in on the small to midsize market because I’m guessing the price tag is probably south of SAP and I’m guessing the processes are not nearly as strict as you typically see in SAP. I’m very curious to see where Cloud ERP goes, and who starts making a real showing. I’m personally thinking I need to look closer at what RAMCO does in the service world. It could be a natural evolution for me 🙂
Thanks for reading and as always, I’d love to hear you thoughts on this trend,
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike