MODERN FINANCE ESSENTIALS 5 Finance Technology Predictions for 2025

By: Jon Gelberg

Admit it. It’s 2016 and you still haven’t transitioned your finance applications to the cloud.

Don’t worry, you’ve got plenty of company. Most businesses and organizations—for a myriad of reasons—have yet to move away from on-premise enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations.

But this hesitation isn’t enough to defy the inevitable pull of innovations in technology. A study from the American Productivity & Quality Centerfound that 76 percent of business leaders say their current ERP solution was unacceptable.

Hear that? Unacceptable.

“My conclusion, with deep analysis, is that this is a mess,” said Oracle CEO Mark Hurd at the recent Modern Finance Experience event in Chicago. (Watch Hurd’s full keynote here.)

The way Hurd sees it, there is a simple solution. He believes it isn’t a question of if you’ll eventually move your ERP solutions to the cloud, but when.

By 2025, the “irresistible force” of the cloud—as Hurd described it—will be the rule, given the current business reality where IT spending has been declining. During the next nine years, he predicts exponential growth in businesses moving their applications to the cloud in the following five ways, which are important for CFOs and finance teams:

1. At least 80 percent of production applications will be in the cloud (up from approximately 25 percent of SaaS applications today)
2. Two cloud suite providers will have 80% of the SaaS apps market
3. 100 percent of new development testing (Dev/Test) will be in the cloud
4. Virtually all enterprise data will be stored in the cloud
5. Enterprise clouds will be the most secure IT environments

Moving multiple functions to the cloud doesn’t just yield immediate costsavings, Hurd says; it also results in increases in innovation and frees up resources.