Rather than adopting the "cathedral method" of IT infrastructure, a growing number of manufacturers are entrusting critical enterprise applications to the hosted model. Both AMR Research and Gartner are projecting growth of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market to be twice as fast as the overall enterprise applications market through 2011.
According to on-demand ERP provider QAD, there are 12 major benefits to this software model for its manufacturing customers:
- IT costs can be trimmed across the enterprise
- Risks can be mitigated
- Improved management of IT talent
- Faster go-live with short time-to-value interval can be realized
- Minimal effort needed to plan and execute implementations
- Additional hardware infrastructure is not required
- Corporate standards and version compatibility are more easily ensured
- Significant reduction in local resource allocation can be realized
- Easier mobility and scalability
- Capital expenditures are reduced
- A simple, cost-effective upgrade path can be rolled out
- Manufacturers can devote more focus to true core competencies (such as manufacturing)
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