Evolution of ERP Software for Small and Medium Business

Evolution of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) for small and medium business made its way way back in 1980 and evolved in business practice and flow of information.

ERP software's was backbone for top 500 companies to run their business operations and was powered by SAP, Oracle and other software giants.

However the term ERP for SMB has evolved last 40 yrs for business operating in this sector and the below image represents the evolution path.

1980 - Character based ERP were introduced which had capabilities to record transactions with low processing power computers and was written with programming languages such as FORTRAN, COBOL and others

1990 - Client Server technology, with rapid growth of computers across organization Novel Network gained momentum allowing computers to networked easily and that led to growth of ERP across network, software's were written in Foxpro, Visual Basic, Java and other technologies which has user interface designs.

2000 - Remote Connectivity, with internet flowing across the network, Cisco contributed to routers and switches that allowed people to connect across the world and gain access to your ERP systems via remote connectivity such as Citrix and still use Client/Server technology or few web based systems.

The client/server had rich interfaces for users to use and mine data however the web based had browser restrictions due to components used and were limited to information that could be displayed to end-users and this space was evolving faster for vendors to keep up.

2010 - Four decades later the evolution of Internet technologies and programming languages has finally reached the Cloud where business can operate efficiently and have entire infrastructure taken care on the cloud.

Cloud ERP software's are written in powerful web based languages which can be categorized into "Open Source" or "Proprietary" mainly Microsoft .Net Technology and Java.

Cloud ERP makes it easier to access from anywhere, on any devices local or remote without hassle and it's bound to grow in near future.

InfoSourcing is Cloud ERP Provider for small, medium and enterprise business.

Evolution of ERP diagram contributed by Acumatica

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