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“Back Office” Software Companies Bring Changes Up Front

The old world of legacy software, where companies ran their systems on physical servers housed in a customer-owned data center, is changing rapidly. Legacy companies like SAP and IBM have had to evolve to an increasingly crowded marketplace, where the cloud is taking more and more prominence in everyday life.

In the past, companies like IBM and Salesforce could provide corporate clients with anything from human resources to supply-chain management solutions through complex, monolithic applications and platforms that serviced “back office” functions.

Relatively newer, cloud-based organizations, like Salesforce, have been aggressively moving into the space. Many are offering solutions for organizational pain points in savvy and innovative ways. A key feature in all of this is public cloud platforms, like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, which can host applications which in the past had been relegated to “on premise” locations. The efficiency, ease of use, and economics of SaaS solutions have made it especially hard for customers to resist.

Recently legacy companies have begun to heed the call. In the past ten years, enterprise-level companies like IBM and SAP have been forced to get in the game simply to keep up. For example, SAP’s new C/4Hana suite of customer experience solutions offers cloud-based tools that perfectly encapsulate the opportunities of this new approach. The application is lightweight, available on all major cloud platforms or in private cloud or in a hybrid model. The suite of tools also has capabilities for plug-in enhancements like AI and machine learning which will help it to continue to evolve along with the breakneck pace of technology.

Business never stops advancing. Thanks in part to this constant innovation, organizations are now enjoying a corresponding evolution in their software tools. Though the evolution is not complete yet, these new tools are quickly adapting to suit needs on the ground in an ever-changing environment.