According to the 2013 ERP Report, from Panorama Consulting Solutions, Cloud ERP solutions account for around 12% of ERP implementations and combined with Software-as-a-Service (Saas) solutions are currently holding around 26% of implementations (based on a four month study polling 172 respondents).

In 2012, this combined figure was just 16%, which indicates some growth however the increase in take up is still slow. The 2013 report highlights that respondents identified the “perception that it is a risky endeavour” to migrate to Cloud ERP even though the company says their “experience has shown that cloud providers typically provide more secure and reliable solutions than any internal IT group…”.

Interestingly, a popular choice ERP for manufacturing firms, SYSPRO, recently reported “significant growth in cloud-based SYSPRO ERP solutions being implemented at SME firms”.

For those businesses who can see some benefits to a cloud implementation but are still concerned over potential risks a hybrid ERP strategy might be worth considering. There are several ways a hybrid solution could be implemented. For example, the core ERP manufacturing processes could be kept on-premise whilst customer facing processes could be hosted in the cloud. The benefit of this is that the customer facing processes can take advantage of social networking tools and information could feed back down into the core system as and when required. If you have a decent sized Internet pipe you could also mirror your core ERP server into the cloud which would improve opportunities for field based personnel whilst lowering the overhead of implementing costly back-to-base connections.