About the Author

Mark Symonds is President and CEO of Plex Systems, Inc., developers of Plex Online, Cloud ERP for the manufacturing enterprise. Symonds’ IT experience includes a highly successful entrepreneurial venture, and IT business consulting at Arthur Andersen & Co. (now Accenture). Symonds holds an MBA in finance and accounting from Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management and a bachelor’s degree in economics and French from the University of Rochester. He is a Certified Public Accountant; certified in production and inventory management (CPIM) by the American Production and Inventory Control Society; and holds a variety of industry association memberships, including the Precision Metalforming Association (PMA), Industrial Fastener Institute (IFI), the Forging Industry Association (FIA), the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) and the Original Equipment Suppliers Association (OESA).

Symonds and his family live in the Greater Detroit area.

What will the software industry look like in 3, 5, even 10 years from now?

There is no question that SaaS, or the Cloud delivery model, will continue to grow as the preferred way to deliver business software applications. Point solution vendors such as Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors and NetSuite have led the way. It is inevitable that deep, vertical full-suite SaaS solutions will gain widespread adoption.

ERP Forecast

We see a changing of the guard in ERP. The major companies when I began my career were Cullinet, Walker, Dun&Bradstreet and McCormick & Dodge. Those mainframe players were replaced by a large number of client-server vendors. Many of the famous companies of the 80′s and 90′s have already disappeared into the abyss at Infor.

Many of today’s ERP brands will not survive. The chasm is too deep and wide for them to get to a true and sustainable SaaS business model and technology.

As I see it, technology will be the least of their problems. Subscription pricing, SAS-70, Service Level Agreements and agile development will do them in.

More vendors of scale will likely offer deep and wide solutions to specific vertical markets. Generic ERP that must be heavily modified for each industry will give way to comprehensive, purpose-built offerings meeting the needs of users in a given market. [Read more...]