Online survey for opensource ERP solutions

I have been researching the open source ERP solutions for sometime now. I am conducting a short survey on this topic and would like to seek few minutes from you to provide feedback. You may be an ERP consultant/Entrepreneur/ Industry Analyst/anyone else following the ERP trends.

I have recently completed the survey. If you would like to provide your response, please follow this Survey Link

-Thank you

Give what the customer wants

Competition for the fast foods is always very intensive. Every 5 years, there is a major disruption, new players get in, the old ones try hard to retain the customers...

See what McDonald's is doing to hold back its customers, especially the target customers in the breakfast category;

http://money.msn.com/business-news/article.aspx?feed=AP&date=20140310&id=17420866

Open Source ERP for Small and Medium Business

When it comes to ERP for small and medium business, there is no one solution that has been immensely popular in this category. The most popular word of mouth, Microsoft Dynamics has at least 2-3 internally competing solutions which is confusing. The other popular solutions like the Sage, Epicor, Infor and others are mature, stable solutions which have not really made real impact. NetSuite has successfully dislodged SAP Business ByDesign; However, NetSuite is a mature and stable solution which is perceived as a competition for SAP and hence loses interest from majority of the SMB. SAP Business One, like many other SAP solutions, looks very cool in the sales cycle. However, a lot of customers have observations around the functionality gaps and the high services costs for customization and extension of the solution.

What other ERP solution(s) are the Small & Medium businesses buying? There is no one conclusive research or reference materials that provides the answers. But given this industry segment has its own limitations and requirements(ranging from simple to complex), the playing field has a large number of small to large players. However, the market is not lucrative for large players like SAP or Oracle since it brings in low revenues that require significant product management and selling efforts.

The open source based solutions like OpenERP, OpenBravo, OpenTaps and others have made significant inroads in to the SMB. It is interesting to see how much success they can achieve in the next 1-3 years.

SAP HANA - The next big migration wave

The world's fortune 1000 or 500 companies have either SAP, Oracle or the next best ERP solution. Organizations now recognize the importance of social media and have been streamlining their IT strategies to support rapid decision making to include social media in the enterprise landscape. Big data based solutions have now begun to receive good reception from large, medium and other specialty industries.

SAP HANA has been positioned as a game changer initiative/solution to enable rapid processing of the organization data across SAP, social media and other unstructured data. Also, HANA disruptive architecture in enabling in-memory processing of large data, single source of data (eliminating multiple databases within the SAP landscape) is expected to improve user experience and reduce the complexity in the overall solution landscape. A completely implemented HANA solution, when implemented, will replace the conventional RDBMS (like Oracle, MS SQL, etc). The business user gets the immediate access to all BW/BI reports, there is no need to wait for the daily/weekly refresh cycles.

In all SAP HANA sounds like a game changer, both for the customers and SAP. While HANA has been around for few years, the high cost deterred majority of the customers in taking that initiative. With SAP's continuous efforts in enabling HANA on all its solutions, reducing hardware and software costs have prompted interest in this solution.

The next 2-3 years will be the real testing period for HANA.