Boomi, a Dell Technologies business and leading provider of cloud-based integration platform as a service (iPaaS), announced the findings from a new global survey that reveals 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.
Commissioned with Coleman Parks, the independent survey of 1,675 CTOs and enterprise architects, which included 300 from Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and the Philippines, 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 to meet business demands in today’s fast, competitive market.
Yet despite the flexibility Composable ERP provides, integrating all of those applications to work collaboratively and share data is still a challenge. As traditional integration solutions require expensive, time-consuming custom development coding, optimization and automation is a high priority to 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.
“Perhaps the biggest challenge every business faces today is unifying their increasingly fragmented digital ecosystem so they can create the seamlessly integrated experiences that customers, employees, and partners now expect,” said Chris McNabb, CEO of Boomi. “The organizations that are removing that friction through fast, intelligent integration and workflow automation 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. Forty-two percent 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 from Asia Pacific and Japan include:
- 95% say they are adopting a Hybrid Integration Platform (HIP) strategy to gain the flexibility to integrate applications and data wherever needed.
- IT modernization projects are top priority for businesses with 76% of respondents currently migrating infrastructure to the cloud, while 79% are focused on application modernization.
- Benefits of modernization by moving their ERP suites to the cloud are improving business efficiency (38%), increasing IT agility (35%), and driving business growth (32%).
- Focus on integration and orchestration strategy by providing the best customer experience possible (55%) and innovating internal processes to be more agile (51%).
- Currently 31% say their organizations are predominantly on-premise with some cloud, but 61% plan to shift to 100% cloud in the next 12 months.
- Applications for ecommerce (38%), business intelligence (36%) and supply chain management (33%) have broken into the cloud, and they predict a move to the cloud over the next 12 months.
- Organizations are now committed to migrating ERP suites to the cloud, and 61% predict that their ERP system will no longer be fully on-premises by 2022.
- Some obstacles hindering modernization are budget constraints (42%), complex hybrid IT environments (31%), and process roadblocks related to legacy technology (35%).
“The business disruption that has carried into this year has compelled organizations in Southeast Asia to boost their digital capabilities, but while many have accelerated modernization projects to manage change and continuity, many struggle with concerns around budget, fragmented IT environments, and legacy technology infrastructure without realizing that IPaaS can solve most of their problems here and fast,” said Ajit Melarkode, Vice-President Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) at Boomi.
“This data highlights that as organizations increasingly lean on digital technologies for operational resilience, many are finding themselves needing hybrid integration capabilities to ‘stitch together’ their new technology investments, and subsequently enable data intelligence for departments, teams and customers.”
“After a year of coping with incredible change, businesses are seeing that modernization is critical to survival,” McNabb added. “We’ve seen heroic efforts by IT teams just keeping their businesses operating during the pandemic. But now is the moment to double down on innovation. Across the world, we see organizations ramping up modernization efforts with Composable ERP. Integration technology, like iPaaS, can power that innovation.”
