If vendors of ERP thought cloud and mobile technologies were going to eat into their spend in 2011, Gartner Group’s survey this year must have been encouraging. The analyst company’s CEO survey showed that chief executive officers still heavily favour tried and tested IT technologies in their strategic plans. For 75 percent of respondents who knew what they would be implementing, nearly 30 percent were planning more ERP and over 20 percent were planning more sales and CRM-related investments. Conrad Steyn, director at Barnestone Holdings, sees a bright future for ERP in certain market segments.

“There are different segments in the market and if you look at small to medium-sized organisations, they are still looking at ERP,” he says. “The future of that market will be for the vendors to make it more affordable, easier to implement and provide solutions like pre-populated systems, for example. But organisations that already have ERP will have a different future. We’re seeing a lot of companies going for the analytical tools and the reason is they’re struggling: business and the economy is tough. So companies need to find ways of digging through their data to become more profitable, hence they’re investing in analytics. In the UK and the US, 60 percent of the sales are in analytics rather than ERP. But different customer segments will drive what they themselves need.”