As all landscape goes, the technical landscape is also strewn with many dead ideas and a few winners.  A winner always creates use cases that add value to the user and when this value addition goes viral, we have a winner in hand.

One of the winners in this corpse strewn IT landscape is cloud deployment.

Till the beginning of this millennium, Supply chain planning solutions were monolithic. They were complex, tough to use, required huge effort and time to deploy and created a huge dent on the balance sheet.

The monolithic solutions were deployed on premise either on the servers maintained by the customer or on a private cloud.  These were configured based on the prevailing business cases. Unlike transactional systems, planning is much more dynamic. In planning, business realities change every 3-4 years. In this changing scenario, the only way to make these mammoth solutions work, was to go for a so called upgrade. This upgrade process also consumed good amount of money and time.

Because of all these ground conditions, supply chain planning solutions were confined to only a few big players with deep pockets.

In this backdrop, came some nimble players who completely revamped the way supply chain planning solutions are architected and deployed. These solutions were cloud based, built to purpose, easy to use and were light on the wallet. They were basically democratizing supply chain planning solutions.

These solutions were on a regular release mode, thereby ensuring that the best and the greatest functionalities are always available to all customers.

In this changing landscape, some companies still cling on to the age old practice of on-premise solutions. To justify their belief they raise concerns like data confidentiality. In the hierarchy of data confidentiality, financial data, customer data, recipes/BOM data are the most important data elements, in that sequence. The first one resides in Financial and Invoicing solutions, the second one resides in CRM solutions and the third one resides in ERP solutions. The cloud version of all these solutions are growing much faster than the on-premise versions. Supply chain planning data comes much lower in the data confidentiality hierarchy. For Supply Chain planning, cloud deployments are growing at 18% compared to 6% for On Premise. It’s just a matter of time before the tide turns completely.