Businesses prioritizing composable ERP strategy as pandemic accelerates cloud migration: Survey

Nine out of 10 organizations worldwide – a staggering 94% – are embracing a Composable Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) strategy to overcome the limitations of legacy applications and modernize their businesses to gain a competitive market advantage, according to a Boomi survey.

Commissioned with Coleman Parks, the independent survey of 1,675 CTOs and enterprise architects shows companies are keenly aware that their legacy ERP systems, the backbone of every organization, are struggling to keep pace with business today. This explains the trend toward the modern strategy of Composable ERP, which gives companies a flexible platform to bridge the gap between legacy and modern applications.

Yet despite the flexibility Composable ERP provides, integrating all of those applications to work collaboratively and share data is still a monumental challenge. As legacy integration solutions require expensive, time-consuming, custom development and coding, optimization and automation are high priorities for IT teams today. This is evidenced by 76% of survey respondents investing in standardization and consolidation of applications, and 72% modernizing applications and migrating to the cloud.

“The typical enterprise has, on average, 850 applications, of which only 30% are connected,” said Chris McNabb, CEO of Boomi. “The biggest challenge every business faces today is unifying their increasingly fragmented digital ecosystem so they can create the integrated experiences expected by customers, employees, and partners. Organizations that remove friction through fast, intelligent data discovery and cataloging, pervasive connectivity, process integration, and automating human workflows are the ones best positioned to thrive as we move beyond the pandemic.”

Leading analyst firm Gartner suggests a focus on integration is critical. “ERP vendors will have to provide or partner with integration platforms in order to meet customers’ demands for increased integration capabilities,” Gartner wrote. “This is because ERP customers will empower business users to bring together applications and data to build business capabilities for their enterprise. Customers will engage multiple vendors, clouds and services to compose capabilities.”

Boomi’s recent findings suggest businesses see the vast potential of Composable ERP but are struggling to implement an integration strategy. In the survey, 51% of respondents said providing the best user experience possible was the motivation behind adopting integration technology. Yet 47% indicated their current integration solutions struggle to meet their challenges. 42% say there is a high cost to maintaining these solutions, with 38% finding that they can’t cope with their complex hybrid technology environment.

Other key survey findings include:

• 97% say they are adopting a Hybrid Integration Platform (HIP) strategy to gain the flexibility to integrate applications and data wherever needed.
• Combined, 95% say improving business efficiency (33%), increasing IT agility (32%), and driving business growth (30%) were the top benefits cited of moving their ERP suites to the cloud.
• Organizations are now committed to migrating ERP suites to the cloud, and 58% predict that their ERP system will no longer be fully on premises by 2022.
• The majority of respondents agreed that the main obstacles hindering modernization are budget constraints (38%), complex hybrid IT environments (37%), and process roadblocks related to legacy technology (35%).

“After a year of coping with incredible change, businesses recognize that modernization is critical to survival,” McNabb added. “As organizations ramp up efforts with Composable ERP, open iPaaS platforms are essential to making it a success.”