2015 Readers' Choice Survey: Enterprise Resource Planning

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The enterprise resource planning (ERP) market continues to mature and evolve with new entrants bringing unique value propositions, and existing vendors making significant investments in usability and functionality. Saravanan Jeganathan, director, Retail/CPG/Hospitality Enterprise Application Services for Cognizant, reveals how ERP is evolving and how SMAC-powered ERP will be the de facto technology IT foundation across the CPG space.

Can you comment on this list?
Jeganathan: The survey results this year indicate that the usual suspects prevailed. SAP is continuing its dominance with a process-centric approach to its ERP product portfolio. It has anchored its leadership position through the key tenants of consolidated business data, streamlined business processes and innovative approaches that enable business functions to operate on-demand.

Oracle retained its leadership position in the SMB space by extending its strategy of lowering IT cost while helping companies remain agile. Oracle also seems to have found success in its accelerated time to market/deploy and rapid implementation tools that have simplified deployments, which seem to resonate with risk averse and cost-conscious SMB customers. Infor, Microsoft and QAD continue to be strong contenders in this space.

How is the ERP landscape of opportunity changing?
Jeganathan: As companies look to consolidate or modernize the ERP environment, they seek vendors that are providing not just advances in functionality and usability, but thought leadership and a clear migration path that helps them generate greater value from continuous innovation without significant cost and disruption.

While cloud is increasingly popular, and mobile access is now a critical baseline capability, there is a new paradigm that is emerging, namely the SMAC Stack (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) that is already reshaping the ERP landscape. This confluence of technologies is rapidly moving business to a point where any IP-addressable devices can be interconnected and known as the Internet of Things.

When you consider the common challenges facing the CG sector around fluctuating demand, ever-increasing trade promotion costs, the need to optimize distribution channels and a lack of effective monitoring mechanisms to evaluate efficiency, the embrace of SMAC technologies by SAP and Oracle in their product portfolios makes perfect sense.

Where should CG companies focus their ERP investments?
Jeganathan: From an investment standpoint, the ERP market is headed in two primary directions: the first being those vendors that are investing in delivering application services via the cloud; the other in which key players are focused on rationalizing and streamlining their existing applications to make them more cost effective and disruption-free. A third emerging direction is application integration, where some vendors are making significant investments and focus around SOA and middleware technology frameworks and tools.