Stark Choices Lie Ahead for Companies Using Legacy On-Premise ERP

Businesses running legacy on-premise ERP software have some tough choices ahead.

Their options: Stay put with the existing investment, or migrate to a new system entirely.

The choice used to be simple. It made perfect sense to stick with what was working (or sort of working). But as the years have gone by, that strategy has become costlier. Indeed, the emergence of cloud ERP has brought into question the very idea of running legacy, on-premise systems. But an on-premise system that is receiving minimal feature enhancements while the vendor focuses on migrating the customer base to an entirely new product? The money spent on provisioning servers and on maintenance and support alone creates a compelling case for moving on, nevermind the upgrade hassles.

But even for those who elected to stay with legacy on-premise ERP, that expensive support comes with its limits. Certainly, there are companies that provide third party support legacy on-premise ERP, but that limits your ability to adapt to change and there’s not many businesses these days operating in an environment where they don’t need to grow and adapt.

In fact, the ability to adapt is one of the compelling reasons for moving on from legacy on-premise ERP. We’ve seen several businesses elect to move from on-premise to NetSuite because the older system did not allow them the flexibility to adapt to change in the marketplace at the speed of modern business. For companies looking to expand into new markets, new business models or even extend a product business into services or add a B2C ecommerce website to their manufacturing and distribution business, managing multiple servers and brittle bolt-on applications that crumble with every upgrade can be a huge weight holding them back. Meanwhile, companies still running legacy on-premise ERP are forced to make significant investments in qualified legacy on-premise ERP administrators, a labor pool that is not likely to see much growth.

The case for moving from legacy on-premise ERP to a true cloud ERP solution has never been clearer. Businesses that have made the move to NetSuite are already seeing the returns on scrapping all of the servers it took to keep their aging ERP systems going. Better yet, NetSuite provides a unified suite of applications extending beyond financials into CRM, inventory, order management and ecommerce, not a string of point cloud solutions still being cobbled together. With more than 30,000 businesses and subsidiaries running on NetSuite, it’s proven and operating at scale.