Bruce Richardson of AMR Research is going on record with pretty interesting call:

“I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about the impact that web services and service-oriented architectures (SOAs) will have on the enterprise applications market, especially ERP. My conclusion: rapid adoption of SOA will lead to the end of the ERP market as we know it.”

Joe McKendrick has some doubts on this outright conversion and how ERP vendors will naturally evolve in this new direction:

“Let’s not give SOA all the credit for liberating our enterprises from the monoliths, however. There are other forces at work disrupting the ERP market as we now it. The growing volume of open source offerings in this space, such as Apache OFBiz, SugarCRM, Tiny ERP, and Compiere. Then there are the software-as-a-service offerings, from Salesforce.com for the CRM aspect to Plexus. (Oracle and SAP are already active in the hosted/SaaS space as well.) The Microsoft mass-market mid-market commodization threat also looms, via Dynamics GP/AX.”

One big elephant nobody is talking about right now and that is Google. Google GFYD will be an interesting outside-in component in this SOA game. They will contribute to this death-by-thousand-cuts of old monolithic apps.

Update: cio blog has an interesting reference to Indian and Eastern European firms building composite apps on top of the existing ERPs