Inteligencia Emotional

1. What types of companies are most likely to adopt cloud-based ERP and CRM software services? Why? What companies might not be well-suited for this type of software?

Cloud-based ERP and CRM solutions are more suitable to companies that:

 Lack of know-how on building and maintaining their own in-house ERP and CRM developed solutions [1, pg. 358].

 Have few resources to invest up-front on traditional ERP and CRM software licenses, on the required infrastructural hardware, and their respective fixed and operational costs [2].

because:

 it enables them to achieve operational excellence and customer intimacy [1, p.363].

 it releases them from infrastructural maintenance and its respective fixed (servers, storage, networking components) and operational costs [2].

 it provides them operational ubiquity [2].

 it allows them to easily subscribe and cancel the subscription without losing large up-front software licenses and hardware investments [2].

Still, this type of software might not be suitable for companies that:

 made large investments on traditional and customized solutions that already work [1, pg. 184, 358].

 cannot rely on availability and security issues inherent to cloud-based solutions.

2. What management, organization, and technology issues should be addressed in deciding whether to use a conventional ERP or CRM system versus a cloud-based version?

Management:

 Service-Level Agreements (SLAs): there is a lack of SLAs concerning ERP and CRM cloud-based solutions, and of methods to ease their respective verification [1, pg. 193, 358].

 Risk Assessment: it is hard to assess the risk when the company does not own the infrastructure that supports the ERP and CRM systems.

 Dependability: companies using cloud-based CRM and ERP solutions might become dependent of their providers since they do not store the data, and might not be able to easily export it to another system if required.

Organization:

 Human-Resource Optimization: while traditional ERP and CRM solutions demand for technical staff, cloud-based solutions allows to optimize HR to focus on operation [3].

Technology:

 Security: using the web as infrastructure, cloud-based ERP and CRM solutions have difficulties in offering security-comfort to companies that own sensible data [1, pg. 321, 322].

 Availability: due to the web-failure tolerant model, cloud-based ERP and CRM solutions suffer from availability