ERP, CRM, Mashup, Cloud. It’s a War on Words.
Salesforce.com maintains a leadership position in terms of the terminology commoditization curve. According to this Ecommerce Times story, however, some companies, like Microsoft, fall into the trap of letting someone else name a trend and then spending lots of its own money popularizing it.
“An alternative for Microsoft might go like this: Microsoft has four ERP systems and one CRM system, and you could make a good argument that it is an ERP company and that ERP ought to be an on-premise application, except in rare cases. I am not saying I agree with it, because there are other benefits of cloud computing we're not talking about here.
“However, the ERP worker is usually someone who works in the finance (or a related) department. This worker does the job at a desk in an office and has little use for a SaaS application. So why the big push to call this ‘cloud computing?' Selling infrastructure services isn't really cloud computing, so why call it that? Why not define yourself in terms of what you do, rather than in terms of what others make up?”
Read the Full Story at Ecommerce Times
