ERP Licensing Perspectives on Adoption of ERPs in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

In English The ERP market has been changing since the implementation peaks
observed around Y2K, when most of the high-end adopters take their chance of
substituting legacy systems while implementing integrated management. This
adoption movement from bigger companies created a reaction on the Small and
Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) ERP market: on the vendor side, it was
necessary to find new market segments to keep profiting, given the saturated
high-end market; on the adopter side, integrated management is necessary for
both integration to large supply chains, and to stay competitive on a globalized market. However, ERP adoption by SMEs faces the problem of the high costs associated to implementation and customization. Given that problem and the improvements on various free/open source projects, this type of licensing have started to become more attractive on the enterprise computing arena. This paper aims to explore the merger of SMEs and ERP under the licensing terms perspectives, by comparing free/open source ERP and proprietary ERP.