Joe Mckendrick has a post summarizing an article by AMR Analyst - Brue Richardson titled "ERP Doomsday Scenario: Death by SOA?" which predicts ""rapid adoption of SOA will lead to the end of the ERP market as we know it."

Here's the doomsday scenario, circa 2010: SAP and Oracle customers have stopped buying applications from their ERP vendors. Instead, they contract with low-cost Indian or Eastern European integrators to build custom composite apps that sit on top of their ERP backbone.

Excerpts from the post:

SOA may not overcome ERP with one big swoop, but through a dribbling of features toward the service layer, forestalling or reducing upgrades. And, indeed, much of this work may go to lower-cost offshore development firms and integrators. Ultimately, Richardson argues, it's the integrators who will benefit from the componentization and service-enabling of ERP.

Let's not give SOA all the credit for liberating our enterprises from the monoliths, however. There are other forces at work disrupting the ERP market as we now it. The growing volume of open source offerings in this space, such as Apache OFBiz, SugarCRM, Tiny ERP, and Compiere. Then there are the software-as-a-service offerings, from Salesforce.com for the CRM aspect to Plexus.

Read full article here

Prashanth Rai