Investing in licensing, IT resources or infrastructure enhancements can be costly for any organization. And for small and mid-size organizations that have smaller budgets to work with, Cloud technologies can provide additional options that will help positively impact the bottom line.

Studies have shown thatCloud solutions deliver lower total-cost-of-ownership (TCO), time to value and quicker ROI than on-premise solutions if the technology maps directly to the business need.

With cloud computing, you can adjust users and applications up or down to meet the changing demands of your business. You can trial applications without a large capital investment and roll out new applications to groups reducing risk and spreading training costs.

Saving the organization from capital Expenditures that last longer on the balance sheet than in the server room may be the most often cited benefit, but there are some you may not have considered.

What are the cost savings associated with moving ERP to the cloud?

Capital costs are reduced because there is no need to purchase computer hardware to house your ERP system. Operational costs, including IT support power to run servers and server operating systems are reduced or eliminated. CFOs also find savings in the ability to rely on predictable monthly costs.

How does a cloud ERP solutions improve ability to scale?

With cloud computing, you can adjust users and applications up or down to meet the changing demands of your business. You can trial applications without a large capital investment and roll out new applications to groups reducing risk and spreading training costs.

As a startup, is a cloud ERP system more than we need?

CloudERP solution is a perfect fit for startup organizations and start up divisions within an existing company. You can use the functionality that you need and expand your use as the company grows. Since there is no capital investment and no IT team needed, you can test markets and change course if your business changes.

Conclusion here is that ERP vendor selection is an important activity. However, it is just one component of successful ERP projects and should be combined with an ERP Business Benefits Realization program to ensure business value and ROI are achieved from the implementation.

Do share with us your thoughts and feedback atbusiness@bodhtree.com

Iaas, Infrastructure as a service is an important proponent of true and complete cloud. Today rackspace, amazon EC2, jamcrackers, S3, Proofpoint, and RightScale are the game changers in IaaS services. The infrastructure as a service is an easy and viable options for cost rationalization, eliminating over dependency on additional resources. Today organizations are strategizing its renewed IT infrastructure management solutions blue print, while experiencing IaaS benefit. In many enterprises today, the infrastructure evolution toward cloud computing is under way. Over the last few years, IT has been responding to new user demands and, in the process, laying the foundation for cloud computing with:

• Consolidation of computing resources
• Virtualization of resources, with some 30 to 40 percent of businesses virtualized today
• Reprovisioning resources on demand
• The beginnings of automation with the decoupling of physical assets and services

Today virtualization and extending the virtualization architecture beyond the boundary of organization, service-oriented architectures  (SOA) and extending service orchestration, automated provisioning, and unified computing are making enterprise IaaS architectures technically and operationally feasible.

Cloud adoption requires an approach that covers the virtualized data center architecture and the IaaS cloud operations management architecture. These architectures must work in conjunction; through cloud service orchestration, changes and updates are made simultaneously to both. The IaaS cloud operations management includes such technologies as cloud service orchestration, which runs an end-to-end workflow; usage-based chargeback mechanisms; service level agreement (SLA) management; and a federated configuration management database (CMDB).

Disaster Recovery: Today, many disaster recovery systems remain expensive, seldom used cost centers. IaaS offers the capability to consolidate multiple disparate disaster recovery systems into a single virtualized instance, shared across multiple IT applications, to increase asset utilization and reduce cost. Potential worldwide revenue in 2013 is forecast to be $1.1 billion. IT Disaster recovery represents a low-risk service for enterprises since they still own primary infrastructure. Provisioning is rapid via orchestration automation. In order to pilot a cloud approach, some enterprises are starting with lower risk IT cloud services, for example, software development and test cloud environments. A high degree of virtualization achieves economy of scale and reduces service delivery costs.

In essence, IaaS is a modular infrastructure solution with data services that can be turned on and off based on customer demand and available capacity. Its flexible architecture scales up or down, enabling elasticity for customers. It also provides rapid provisioning and end-to-end SLA management capabilities. The data center architecture, which can span many data centers, can provide business continuity and disaster recovery. IaaS also delivers ease of platform migration for workloads, multiuser support, and multiple application lifecycle support.

So not only are there quick deployment, migration, and scaling of enterprise applications and associated infrastructure, but the cost advantages for enterprise applications from IaaS are significant: low cost per resource; no waste from over dimensioning; and capital expense is converted to operating expense, a variable cost. Most importantly, the rapid provisioning and orchestration capabilities intrinsic to cloud and IaaS transform the user’s experience of service delivery, in contrast to traditional service procurement cycles, which could take months rather than minutes.