The state of enterprise applications

It appears to be the season for enterprise applications surveys. InformationWeek and CIO magazine just released results from recent inquiries, and they both found that the core programs, like ERP and CRM, remain costly, complicated and challenging.

The most important enterprise applications for many large businesses are ERP, CRM, BI and supply chain systems. According to CIO magazine's survey of 405 IT professionals, BI ranks highest on the priority list for the year ahead. As CIO's Thomas Wailgum notes, this ranking makes sense given the growing pressure on IT departments to come up with productive BI data.

Even though ERP, CRM and supply chain software do not come in as high on the CIO radar right now, it isn't because they are less important, but because they are more established applications, Wailgum says. It is the BI software that companies are struggling to get their arms around these days.

CIO found that overall, IT is trying simultaneously to achieve growth and restrain budgets. Forty-nine percent of the survey respondents said they expect to concentrate on business process growth and revenue growth, while another 49 percent said they expect to concentrate on reducing costs and improving efficiency.  

While enterprise software remains a vital concern for IT pros, it doesn't mean the pros are happy with it. InformationWeek found, in its 2010 Enterprise Applications Survey, that professionals are fully satisfied with neither traditional enterprise software nor the alternatives, such as software as a service or service-oriented architecture.

The cost and implementation complexity of ERP, CRM and supply-chain applications on the market continue to leave technology pros dissatisfied, according to InformationWeek's survey of 485 respondents. Most enterprises are probably going to be using a combination of applications and cloud-based services or services on the premises. Growth in software as a service and cloud computing services has occurred primarily in programs such as email, CRM and collaboration, as concerns about security appear to have restricted their growth in more mission-critical systems, such as ERP. 

For more:
- see this article about CIO magazine's survey
- see this article about InformationWeek's survey

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IT trends for 2010