Generally speaking, the topic of ERP systems’ cross-platform capability does not surface very often, and we wouldn’t publish a special article if we hadn’t been asked to quite expressly.
Although this resulted from the asking person’s specific abberations.
But why not?
So we stretch our ungodly clawed paws to the luminous concept of cross-platform software.
I. Cross-Platform ERP Systems: What These Are About
Following Descartes, let us agree on the terms’ meanings first.
We understand cross-platform capability as the ability to run in the same way on different hardware managed by different operating systems: Linux, Mac osX, Windows, Windows Phone, QNx etc.
This naturally assumes that the end user works in an application native to the operating system being used – without emulators, virtualizers, etc.
And where a Web application is used (with the users getting their functionality via a Web browser), it will be correct to speak about cross-browser capability. That is, the same Web application works in the same manner in different browsers (Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, Firefox etc.) on different devices (tablets, smartphones, notebook PCs, etc.)
II. Who Needs it and What For? On Paper and in Life
What is this cross-platform feature (further understood to mean cross-browser capability as well, unless otherwise specified) needed for, and in what areas?
Ordinary motley practice can be reduced to just two base cases:
- a cross-platform application to be used for in-house corporate needs (broadly understood);
- a cross-platform application to be used by an unlimited range of persons.
A clear advantage of cross-platform applications in the latter case is easy distribution that is critical to the market success of a product (usually shareware) and its monetization.
A graphic example is Internet messengers – from ICQ to Skype, with a distribution model similar to viral multimedia.
It is clear, however, that ERP systems are a perfect example of software for corporate use only (perhaps, the perfect example).
Here the following advantages of cross-platform capability are usually seen as follows:
- savings in license payments.
If a big corporation is a zoo of various equipment, with the resultant multitude of operating systems, then the buyer of a cross-platform system is delivered from the need to replace ‘alien’ equipment and operating systems; his ERP system works on all. - easy system deployment – both by virtue of the previous paragraph and due to the ease of connecting new personnel using the BYOD model (meaning a client module of the ERP system installed on the employee’s personal device that he/she carries home and back).
- focused specialists of the admin breed could probably cite more bonuses, but these would anyway be derived from the above ones while being of quite a technical nature.
However, while for Internet messengers the cross-platform usability feature is essential to their survival (just imagine the market prospects of a messenger running on Windows only), …
... how important are the cross-platform advantages for an ERP system?
Let’s trifle a little with this tricky question.
А. An ERP system is, in a sense, an antipode of virally distributed software. Its tasks and application area both hint at some secrecy and restricted access.
Thus, guns are controlled in all jurisdictions that require, at the very least, a license and arms storage in metal boxes.
The user of Internet messengers is a free economic agent, while an office employee must follow his employer’s work standards and security policy. And if an employee’s interaction with his employer becomes problematic because the former wants to run a Windows ERP application on his Linux notebook only, then something is wrong with either party.
Meaning, with the employer’s HR function and/or the work environment offered.
B. The implementation of an ERP system is no cheap affair by definition.
At an enterprise of a size that really creates the problem of a legacy equipment zoo, such implementation will cost millions and tens of millions of dollars. The cost of any equipment to be replaced (with their OS, some of which are free at all) is lost in this order of magnitude – while periodic replacement of equipment is inevitable for natural technological reasons.
В. The real equipment and OS zoo problem emerges exclusively in poorly organized and managed companies of whatever scale.
The world’s biggest commercial work-givers (and to call pension offices and other bureaucratic institutions ’work-givers’ is a scientific misnomer) Walmart and McDonalds, employ some two million people each.
We have grave doubts that an equipment zoo is really a problem for either company.
Somehow we are sure that those ’enemy corporations’ real business concerns exclude any IT zoo nuisance.
Г. Where important groups of business processes have to be performed on special equipment due to natural reasons (rather than mismanagement), such equipment needs NO connection to the general ERP system.
Thus, the productivity of a major car manufacturer’s designers will hardly drop because no Windows client of a corporate single-platform ERP system can be installed on their Mac PCs.
E. Ordinary situations where a certain type of devices has to be connected to an ERP system to provide some shop functionality are naturally resolved by developing specialized mini clients for the ERP systems, with fixed functionality.
Practical examples include: warehouse data collection terminals, a travelling salesman’s workstation based on an Android smartphone, or a report-viewer for Apple devices.
F. Helpful on those rare occasions (not encountered or even heard of in real life) where a full-fledged ERP client still has to be run on exotic equipment and OS, are the virtually unlimited functions of all sorts of in-between programmes like Remote Desktop Protocol with its thousands of implementations, virtual machines, wine type technology for individual operating systems and sysadmins’ other magic exercises.
Productivity is impaired somewhat, but this only applies to the executable client part of the system on the given device. And (if necessary) even this is easily addressed by raising the local device’s computing power locally (and cheaply).
In sum, dear readers, we shall not sin much against the truth by saying that the theoretical advantages of cross-platform ERP systems are so insignificant in practice as to be actually non-existent.
III. ‘How much is the fish?’, asks a TV viewer from Scooter.
Cross-platform capability does not come free. (What a surprise!)
No development framework, nor even Java, provides the absolute level of abstraction from the OS to be used.
As a result, both the development and support of an application take additional effort.
To put it simply, cross-platform capability results in a 50% overhead per platform to be supported. This applies to the full application development and testing budget and the patients’ average temperature across the hospital; the extra costs may vary widely both ways case-by-case.
The costs of cross-platform usability are not limited to the additional development and support costs.
As a free but quite mandatory supplement, you get a myriad of both local glitches and system-wide reliability, productivity and security problems.
We show it on an example familiar to everybody.
There is the Apple platform for mobile devices — iPod, iPhone, and iPad.
A totally standardized one, supporting a minute number of devices.
The platform is despotically managed by a single vendor.
And there is Android — with its ultimate cross-platform capability and – attention – a piece of freeware!
Billions of most incredible devices work under Android.
As a result of free market competition, Android has become – alas – a synonym of cheap Chinese trash, guaranteed glitches, compatibility problems (yes, this is what cross-platform capability ultimately leads to), an abundance of vendors’ proprietary shells perched on top of the standard OS, viral vulnerability, and poor management of hardware resources – including battery charge.
And we also suspect Apple alone to receive a greater profit than all the producers of Android devices on the Earth taken together.
The financial performance of the producers of software for both platforms seems to be similarly related.
UPD 30.05.2015: Here is finally the proof.
The Apple and Android example applies to personal electronics, where the relative advantages of both platforms are mainly food for forum Holy Wars and fans’ phallometry and the losses are most often limited to a lost phonebook.
Characteristically, an individual fan’s worship of Android ends once he or she gets enough money to afford an Apple device.
Our second example is about highly productive industrial systems on which adult men work, whose price order begins with six zeros, and data corruption costs are unlimited: Oracle Database Appliance, Oracle Exadata Database Machine etc.
What can we see here?
Actually full similarity to the Apple platform: a fixed set of equipment running a specialized operating system on top of which the same vendor’s DBMS (and nothing else) is installed.
The purpose of all this is to make the system more reliable and to reduce the costs by operating a single complex from one vendor who is responsible for the end result.
IV. Total: What We Had in France in the 14th Century
Let us sum up.
On the credit side of cross-platform ERP systems we have quite insignificant advantages.
Honestly speaking, fictitious ones.
On the debit side are much higher costs (in all senses) plus reliability, productivity and security problems.
And the ‘advantages’ are one-time ones, while paying the extra costs and struggling with the constant problems will be your lifelong burden.
In summary, dear Comrades, the fetish of cross-platform ERP system is just another example of an expensive and hardly workable solution to a non-existent problem.