Headquartered in Pune, India with its regional offices in Dubai, UAE & North Carolina, Aashna Group is a Technology consulting company offering services on Cloud & Mobility through its product- ‘Aashna Cloudtech and Veloziti entities’. The company is also associated with other cloud computing vendors such as NetSuite, Silkroad, Workforce Software, Google, Box and Docusign.

Cloud or hosted services, especially Software as a Service (SaaS), have been the topic of much ERP-related buzz in recent years. Traditionally, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions were regarded as “software crown jewels”. Though they were expensive, bulky and large, they stood at the epicenter of a company’s core business. Not surprisingly then, the IT people considered the cloud as a fanciful escapade. ERP’s can save a lot of time and money, among other benefits. But Cloud computing programs being cost-efficient, also been found to enhance worker morale and productivity. Therefore, conventional wisdom suggests that cloud-based ERP implementation can benefit organizations in a variety of ways.

The advent of cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployments are at the forefront of a change in the way businesses think about ERP. Moving ERP to the cloud allows businesses to simplify their technology requirements and more quickly see a return on their investment.

According to Ventana Research, the transition from host based midrange systems to client/server technology was one of the most significant steps taken towards ERP solutions. Legacy ERP solutions are not only expensive, but also time-consuming and cumbersome to maintain and modify from time to time. While, some vendors have made it less costly to configure in recent times, legacy ERP systems lack attention to detail which might be a pain in the neck after a period of time. Instead, the answer may be blowing in the cloud for such clients.

Heading towards Cloud

Many companies are recognizing with every passing day that migrating ERP systems to the cloud would eliminate the major obstacles faced by their on-premise solutions. Cloud ERP systems can also go a long way towards helping companies consolidate disparate business systems. They not only cut down the hardware costs but greatly reduce the operational costs as well. In addition, there is no need for an extra IT support team to periodically upgrade the system and patches manually.

Secondly, a cloud based ERP solution helps people to collaborate simultaneously on an issue on the cloud in real-time. Anything from an inventory problem to a supplier issue can now be solved with just a few clicks.

Moreover, role-based dashboards could also be created as per the user requirements and remote access to information is also available on cloud based ERP solutions which is lacking in on-premise ERP solutions.

Hybrid Cloud: ERP’s future

Cloud-services are growing in popularity among leading businesses that want applications with modern functionality.

Gartner predicted that by 2017, 70% of the organizations adopting hybrid ERP will fail to improve cost-benefit outcomes unless their cloud applications provide differentiating functionality & by 2018, at least 30 percent of service-centric companies will move the majority of their ERP applications to the cloud.

We can see the trend of businesses looking to improve administration through the advantage of lower costs, better functional fit and process flexibility offered by blending cloud applications with on-premise applications in what we now refer to as new-age ERP.