Gartner has seen a major increase in the number of end-user inquiries about cloud solutions, mainly of the public cloud variety. At the same time, the number of inquiries about on-premises and hosted solutions has fallen dramatically. The major attractions of the cloud solutions are: The market for cloud suites will continue to evolve over the next five years. As yet, not every vendor has completed its industry coverage, plans for functionality and geographic coverage. And not all can sell effectively to all the sectors they target. Many large organizations with extensive on-premises business application architectures for core financial applications are investigating cloud solutions’ capabilities and gauging when they should switch to the cloud.

For many multi billion dollar organizations, this point may be several years off. Many are pursuing a postmodern ERP strategy that involves:

• The ability to keep up to date with new releases (customers are generally forced to stay within one or two releases of the current one)
• A more consumerlike interface
• Improved analytics
• Improved agility, gained through faster introduction of new functionality
• More emphasis on end users (in the office of finance) managing the applications, with less reliance on IT staff

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