MS Promises All Its ERP Tools Will Move to Cloud
When you think of ERP bigwigs, you probably conjure up SAP and Oracle. But Microsoft is also in this (very big) business. Microsoft didn't build its way into ERP -- it bought its way. Redmond bought Great Plains, Axapta, Solomon and Navision, four separate ERP vendors. That left Microsoft with four separate ERP platforms. Microsoft tried to turn the four into one through Project Green, which it gave up on. Computer scientists know that merging four huge platforms may not be impossible, but it's clearly implausible.
Now Microsoft is doing something also ambitious, but plausible: It wants to take its four ERP lines and make them run on the cloud.
There is no timeframe, which makes sense for a project of this magnitude. What the company does say is the next major rev of all these tools will be cloud-ready.
Posted by Doug Barney on 04/19/2011 at 12:47 PM