You hear a constant whirring or beeping sound when you walk past the server room that may be just annoying. Or it might indicate that something is failing. Or maybe you’re feeling the pain of having been told that it’s time to upgrade the server again in order to continue running your Sage software, and you ask yourself: “Didn’t we just upgrade that server a few years ago?” There is a chance you have been tempted to move everything to the Cloud, or maybe you’re being forced to because of changes to the work environment. Now is as good a time as any to make the switch for your Sage 100 software. But how do you know where to begin - or whether this solution even makes sense for you?

These days, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software vendors tend to focus either on ease of user experience or the functional benefits of their products. Rarely, if ever, do you find a vendor touting both advantages in a single solution. Those pushing functionality tend to use trendy language like “Cloud-enabled” or “Cloud-friendly”, by which they often mean that the ERP system can be hosted somewhere other than on a computer inside your organization. In that sense, "Cloud-whatever" is mostly about marketing and has woefully little do to with the qualities of the technology itself. True Cloud software means something more than where you install it.

Moving your business online can be a daunting undertaking. It requires careful coordination to bring back office functions together with an attractive and relevant online presence. One of the advantages of an advanced Enterprise Resource Planning system is its innate ability to bridge these two realms and automate much of what transacts between them. Trying to connect them manually will lead to endless time spent - and errors made - in simply moving the data from place to place. Conversely, an ERP system can ease the amount of effort and improve precision in synchronizing your administrative and accounting efforts with your storefront website. Towards that objective, here's a free infographic that provides an overview for taking your business to the internet and lists the benefits of embracing ERP capabilities.

In April of this year, Nucleus Research published the results of a study that shows cloud-based application projects producing 2.1 times the return on investment (ROI) of on-premise ones. This figure is up a whopping 24% from their 2012 analysis, which demonstrated a still respectable 1.7 times ROI advantage. That substantial gain applied to Enterprise Resource Planning systems among a field of other enterprise-based applications (e.g. Customer Relationship Management, Workforce Management, Supply Chain Management). Why the growing advantage, and why is the separation almost certain to continue expanding? The study cites two main reasons.

Deloitte recently published findings from their fourth annual Growth Enterprise Services survey that polled 500 mid-market executives (i.e. executives from companies with annual revenues ranging from $100 million to over $1 billion). The objective of the survey was to investigate the perceived role of technology in this business stratum and gauge how those perceptions influence decisions. You can read a summary of the findings here and even download the nitty-gritty results, but what follows are the highlights and what they might mean for companies in that range looking for an Enterprise Resource Planning solution.