ERP and Billing Systems that Stall Innovation and Growth | Part 1

The world of enterprise applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and billing, can seem boring to people who are more interested in what is going on at Amazon, Facebook, Google and Twitter, or the latest iPhone or Android application. In the late 1990s when ERP systems first came on the scene, there was plenty of drama and hype. The vendor marketing bravado and cut-throat competition, failed multi-million dollar projects, implementations spanning years and massive cost overruns are still fresh in the minds of many. Who can forget the legendary “moon” on the high seas between SAP’s Hasso Plattner and Larry Ellison’s Oracle boat? The infamous rivalry and competition between Oracle and SAP continues into this century with a battleground that now spans ERP and also databases. Meanwhile, in the late 2000s, certain venture capitalists (VCs) could not get enough of social media startups focused on consumers or cloud companies focused on Internet merchants. Many of the best minds of the generation were worried about how to make people click ads.

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