Can ERP Vendors Deliver On Industry 4.0 Expectations?

In the IT business, innovation is king. If you fail to keep up, you run the risk of falling behind and becoming stale. There's where ERP as a product category found itself thanks to the advent of cloud computing, and now we're on the cusp of finding out if the ERP market can deliver on the next set of emerging capabilities -- machine learning, artificial intelligence, and IoT – which industry watchers have termed Industry 4.0. We're at an interesting inflection point in enterprise software at the moment, in particular how well-established players react to rapid technological innovation. In the last decade, we've seen how cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS) delivery methods rendered old ERP business models nearly obsolete, as companies sought innovation in business processes and simplified deployments.