Oracle CEO Mark Hurd has said that “Business IT is going through a  massive, generational change to the cloud.” With the release of Panorama Consulting’s 2018 ERP Report, we can see the breadth of that generational change: 85 percent of responding organizations have adopted either software-as-a-service (SaaS) ERP solutions or full cloud-based ERP systems. This is a huge increase in cloud ERP adoption from Panorama’s 2017 report, which showed that 67 percent of its respondents were still using on-premises ERP systems.

Oracle ERP Cloud was Panorama respondents’ system of choice for a cloud-based ERP solution, as 16 percent of respondents had selected Oracle as their ERP vendor. When combined with the 5 percent of respondents who selected NetSuite for their ERP needs — NetSuite has been part of Oracle since 2016 — the number jumps to 21 percent, which represents an install base several percentage points higher than that claimed by any other vendor in the Panorama study. Oracle is now nearly halfway towards Mark Hurd’s prediction at the 2018 Modern Finance Experience conference that “The top ERP company will own more than half of the market.”

Why is Oracle the vendor of choice for today’s business leaders? Some prominent CFOs have highlighted Oracle ERP Cloud’s diverse integrations and high degree of scalability as key differentiators that helped Oracle stand out. High degrees of scalability and integration could make Oracle ERP Cloud’s full feature set intimidating to some IT departments. However, Oracle has provided ongoing education and training to its users on many channels, including on its official Facebook page and Twitter feed.

The vast majority of respondents, 84 percent, reported spending less than two percent of their organization’s annual revenues on ERP solutions. Additionally, Panorama found that 78 percent of its respondents recouped the costs of their investments in cloud ERP solutions in three years or less. This supports a similar report from Nucleus Research, which showed that cloud ERP systems provide 3.2 times as much return on investment as on-premises systems.

Adopting a cloud ERP system  provides organizations with superior access to their critical data. Panorama’s study found that 55 percent of respondents reported improved data reliability, while four out of five respondents, or 80 percent, reported better information availability on their cloud ERP systems as compared to previous on-premises solutions.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) offer finance professionals the opportunity to extract meaningful insights from the huge data sets their enterprises produce. Oracle’s 2018 ERP Trends report found that 43 percent of finance professionals are interested in or exploring AI, and 40 percent are interested in or exploring ML. Oracle ERP Cloud allows business leaders to explore these technologies without onerous development or adoption costs. AI and ML can  help streamline report generation for finance departments. Mark Hurd noted in his Oracle OpenWorld 2017 keynote speech that AI and ML will be “features engineered directly into applications,” and Oracle has pursued this strategy throughout its range of cloud solutions.

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