Cloud Computing A Way To Unify Disparate Systems

As organizations look to save money in their system investments the pendulum is swinging back towards specific point solutions.  See our post Re-emergence of pointed solutions.

Companies that already spent money on a complete ERP suite are now looking to solve specific problems.   The advent of cloud computing and the wide variety of applications now available for consumers offers organizations endless choice.  The advantage of this means that traditional in-house systems and newly employed systems can be integrated more easily.

The advent of SaaS and the new delivery models it has created has allowed organizations the freedom to leverage open source, open standards, API’s, SDK’s and even Platform as a service (PaaS). The extent of applications built specifically for unified communications and collaboration also contribute to the goal of a seamless office with all systems working together for the good of the organization.

These newly offered cloud applications be it for BI or any other specific functions can be more easily integrated using the cloud.  As the cloud can provide a central repository for data to be merged, leveraged, aggregated and disseminated throughout the organization.  This infrastructure application strategy is becoming more of a norm as this method of consolidation has began to emerge thus resolving disparate systems.   Remember, one of the main reasons ERP software has become these massive suites was the lack of ability of a smooth integration for systems to co-exist and to keep the data in one place.

With the cloud unification of data from all systems both the combination of in-house and cloud computing the cloud can provide an alternative to tie systems together, increase storage capacity, facilitate easy backup procedures, build a repository for content throughout the organization and provide a way for internal company resources to leverage all information from within the organization for its use.