Moving CRM and ERP applications to the cloud is a pretty significant trend, says Rebecca Wetteman, vice president of research at Nucleus Research, Boston. "We talk to a lot of folks and see broad adoption of cloud computing and open-source tools out there," she says. Rather than pay someone to support a packaged application internally, cloud computing in general allows enterprises to take advantage of applications that they can tweak to address their specific requirements. Leveraging economies of scale, cloud computing providers can make support costs less expensive, and it's generally less costly when it comes time to upgrade as well.
