The weekend review: the cloud in acronyms — ERP, CD and more
It was a big week for the cloud, no doubt spurred by AWS’ massive Re:invent conference in Las Vegas, next week’s Salesforce.com Dreamforce event, and perhaps even the breaking news that Google has won its long-standing battle to scan more than 20 million books from libraries and make them available on the internet. The week’s most popular research content was also cloud-focused, as Gigaom Research subscribers checked out reports on continuous delivery (CD) and enterprise resource planning (ERP).
First, in “Cloud-based ERP: finally time for back office as a service?” Laura Stuart takes a look at cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP), especially among large-scale manufacturers. While ERP has changed the way that businesses of all sizes handle IT — for example, cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications have gained widespread adoption and use for sales, marketing, and customer service operations — the adoption of cloud-based technologies has lagged for back-office operations. As many large corporations now prioritize cloud-based ERP implementation, their potential ERP providers are rushing to meet the market demand for cloud-based systems. Aimed at both service providers and manufacturers, Stuart presents three case studies of companies that have implemented cloud-based ERP systems, including an overview of disruptive technologies and market forces that could impact this sector in the near-term future.
Next, in “Moving toward continuous delivery as a service,” Dave Ohara presents a detailed overview of continuous delivery for CTOs and other technology buyers who are interested in implementing continuous delivery, which he defines as “a process that uses agile development and automated tools to create and deploy robust software services.” Ohara breaks the continuous delivery decision into two primary options: creating your own continuous delivery pipeline or using a continuous delivery as a service provider. Ohara highlights the best practices and advantages and challenges behind each approach before diving into a use case, a brief analysis of current service providers, and a list of key takeaways.
Last, David Linthicum has a few words of advice in his latest weekly update, “Three of the dumbest things you can do with clouds.” Citing mistakes he’s observed among enterprises that are using cloud-based systems, Linthicum identifies three major areas that enterprises need to more carefully consider in their cloud strategy and offers some words of advice on how to resolve these issues and avoid similar problems in the future.
Also popular this week:
Survey: the mobile shopping apps consumers value most
The 2013 task management tools market
The wearable-computing market: a global analysis
