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Upgrades to ERP’s memory, storage, and core electronics boost power and agility, while lowering maintenance costs.

As much as many CIOs may wish to turn over the mundane responsibilities of maintaining infrastructure, servers, and storage to cloud service providers, they can’t completely—at least not yet. A point often obscured by the hype surrounding the cloud is that many cloud-based offerings do not currently offer sufficient capabilities to meet the IT demands of most complex business environments. Younger companies or those with relatively simple business models may well be able to source everything they need from an SaaS provider. Not so for established organizations. Many cloud-based offerings are in their infancy, and do not yet offer the functional maturity these companies require.

This can leave CIOs in a quandary as to whether to continue investing in on-premise ERP engines that may be replaced in the not-too-distant future. Recently, enterprise system vendors have answered this question in a way that defies the conventional wisdom about the inevitability of migrating to the cloud. By adding high-performance CPU, advanced memory technologies, and enhanced storage, among other improvements, they have created more powerful ERP engines that use less power, deliver greater agility, and cost less to maintain.

These upgrades have given ERP a new lease on life. The ability to pay less for a more powerful systems engine makes it possible to implement and support additional capabilities that deliver unprecedented levels of innovation. For example, many mobile, social, and analytics strategies involve extending existing enterprise applications, revitalizing their business cases, and enhancing the value of original investments. For organizations that have already invested tens of millions in automating their core businesses, the latest iteration of ERP can be an ongoing enabler of innovation, not a fading legacy system that’s just biding time.

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