AMR Research released the "Enterprise Resource Planning Spending Report, 2006-2007," which found U.S. companies will increase their ERP budgets by 12.3% in 2007.

Points to ponder:

• ERP vendors have expanded the functionality of their products through both internal growth and acquisition, thus enabling them to garner a larger share of overall application spending.
• The survey found that technology buyers understand the need to invest in better information systems, and in most markets they have the capital to do so.
• "This year and next will experience levels of ERP investment that we haven't seen since the late 1990s," said Jim shepherd, senior vice president, AMR Research.
• "At that time, new customers were replacing legacy systems with ERP suites. Today, spending is driven by a healthy mix of new customers, consolidation projects, add-on applications, and deployment to additional users."
• 43% of respondents aim to have a single global ERP system within three years-compared with only 26% today.
• Manufacturing and retail buyers favor a single-vendor packaged ERP system.
• 55% of respondents in the process of making ERP system selections said SAP was on the list of vendors they were considering, while 43% of respondents said Oracle was on their list.

AMR Research released a report that stated the enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications market grew to $25.4B in 2005, and will reach $29B in 2006. Over the next five years, the market will grow at an average of 10%."The integrated versus best-of-breed debate still goes on in some organizations, but the suite advocates are clearly winning," said Jim Shepherd, senior vice president of research at AMR Research. "In addition, we now see many of the remaining ERP vendors compete effectively with companies of all sizes." Continuing the trend of fewer vendors owning a larger share of the market, SAP and Oracle now represent 65% of new license sales.

Source: 1, 2 , 3

Prashanth Rai