Thoughts on the Cloud, Both Sides Now
If you have been to a conference or user group event lately you have certainly heard plenty about "the Cloud". This broad term actually covers a lot of different services and architectures, but in the ERP community it generally causes some anxiety for technical professionals. There are concerns about no longer managing your own hardware or no longer customizing the software to your specific business requirements. Some organizations have huge investments in custom development. Some also remember previous negative experiences with the "hosted" solutions that were pre-cursors to the modern cloud architectures. I understand, and to some extent, share some of those feelings. Change is hard. However, software vendors like Oracle are pushing cloud services and applications hard, and I think resistance is the wrong approach. I am not advocating for or against cloud solutions and I am not providing a comprehensive review of the solutions. What I ...