ERP - Market maturity.

In about a decade's time, the ERP market has become more mature. The major players in these market have consolidated their position. Though, its pretty difficult to compare what one had in ERP market about a decade back and what is now available, however, some feature worth noting are,

Application availability over web.

Singe instance, meaning a company having operation across geographies have single application and consolidate resource usage.

ERP in cloud computing is slowly catching up, this mean company need not own /licence for the application, hardware or IT support team anymore.

ERP products and increasing becoming "plug and play" type. Earlier, ERP product had very few module revolving around finance or manufacturing domain, but these days entire business process including sales, service and Business intelligence are covered. Due to this, customization or extension of form based application would reduce OR has reduced. In a way its better to avoid customization due to maintainance cost and cost incurred due upgrade when the standard product is due for upgrade.

Instead of customization, one would definetely find a standard product to plug the gap perhaps you may not find from the same product developer but from a third party product developer. So natuarally integration would play an important role. 'Customization' is something like you own it and its your responsibility to take care of the 'baby', whereas once you have choosen the standard product through licencing route you have outsourced support.

I also feel, we would be slowly moving to time when a ERP expert will be in position to support multiple customer and provide his service and support from even a remote location due to high speed internet availability.