Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

Enterprise applications suites, commonly known as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, represent the transactional backbone for most enterprises and comprise a variety of applications for finance and administration as well as industry-specific applications for business operations. Comprehensive ERP suites from leading vendors now typically span customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), analytics, and other applications traditionally sold as best-of-breed products. As vendors and enterprises enter the next generation of applications that support new deployment options like software-as-a-service (SaaS), deliver on service-oriented architecture (SOA) principles, and support business processes via Web services, Forrester's ERP research provides the knowledge of the basics, best practices, trends, strategic advice, and vendor and product comparisons that firms need in order to navigate the complexities across the software ownership life cycle.