Amid ERP skills shortage, customers look to SaaS choices

It used to be that companies weighed a purchase of a vendor's software mostly by its merits-whether the packaged application was robust enough for a company's needs, how it would play with the company's other back-office systems, how long it took to implement and, of course, whether the customer could get a good price from the vendor.

Now, due to an acute skills shortage in enterprise software circles that's hitting SMBs especially, a new and critical selection criterion has been added to the top of the mix: Availability of resources to help implement the SAP or Oracle software, according to recent research from AMR Research analyst Dana Stiffler.

With these big enterprise software vendors successfully promoting software products to manage business processes to small- and medium-sized businesses, the supply of skilled people to manage these products has not kept up with demand.

"SAP and Oracle application skills, in particular, are in huge demand, with service providers reporting their ERP practices continue to experience double-digit growth and strong pricing premiums relative to other IT skills," Stiffler writes in the recent "U.S. ERP Skills Gap Leaves Titans Vulnerable" report. "They tell us the packaged applications business is limited only by their ability to find, train, and place appropriate resources."

Those resources are in short supply right now-and not just for ERP skills. Included on the list of most highly valued SAP skills, according to Foote Partners data, are: SAP Master Data Management; NetWeaver Business Intelligence / Business Warehouse; Business Objects; and SAP Human Capital Management.

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