Tasos Christidis

In this time and age where Social Media have become an integral part of our lives (private and professional), there is an ongoing discussion about Social ERP (sERP), social CRM (sCRM) and other “s-prefixed” systems. In this post I’d like to contribute my own definition of the “Social” tag and discuss how this could be served by web-based systems and even enhanced by SaaS communities (I use the term “SaaS communities” to show that users working on a cloud Service (public or private) form a new “closed” community which – like any other community – chooses to open up to certain other teams (a.k.a. other users) under certain restrictions and rules (a.k.a. authorizations).

Through this channel I have been talking about the advantages of cloud and SaaS products for a long time. In this post I’d like to focus on a more specific area. An area that contains a large pool of potential customers, who at the same time are still facing basic problems in their journey towards a “computerized enterprise”. That of small business ERP and especially the Financial ERP . By the term “Financial ERP” we define the software that performs the basic functions of book-keeping, sales and purchases, stock keeping customer/vendor order management and perhaps some more like basic workflows and some kind of business intelligence. These are requirements that small and medium-sized businesses are seeking to approach first, or they have already done so with not much success. Also, they are the kind of requirement that start-ups are trying to cover, since they touch the back-bone of the business function.