According to a study, international provider of ERP and enterprise software companies are increasing investment in technology, Cloud for back-office applications, but growth will remain stable this year.

The study was based on responses from 700 medium and large dynamic organizations from 12 countries.

Almost half of respondents (334) mentioned that at this time that they does not use any Cloud application  for back-office, and almost one third (222) said that between 1% and 25% of their back-office functions on Cloud. 32% of respondents believe that Cloud Computing will invest more this year and another 32% said it will invest at the same pace as in 2010.

The growth potential in the enterprise space is very important. Six respondents from companies of different sizes, geographical locations and sectors stated that their back-office functions are 100% based on Cloud.

An important point to note in this study is that there is no real knowledge of the functioning of cloud services, as the three main disadvantages perceived with Cloud Computing model are:

• Loss of control (51%)
• Internet Unit (54%)
• Difficult to customize (38%)

This clearly exposed the need to present a clear and unified concept, after presenting the different alternatives that allows for potential customers in this model can be identified easily.

Although 123 organizations of public sector mentioned that they currently use low cloud model, and although relatively few have been planned investment for 2011, 25% believe that this model represents between 25% and 50 % of its back-office applications in ten years, along with the 17% estimated to be between 50% and 75%. The main perceived advantage of Cloud technology, according to respondents in the public sector is its ease of maintenance.

According to the study, 24% of respondents are already using an application on Cloud for accounting , ahead of any other process, while little has been invested in other back-office applications, including managing the supply chain and production. Surprisingly, only 8% of respondents have invested in technology-based CRM Cloud.

Only 9% expected to remain at 100% applications in its facilities, while 8% expected to be completely based on Cloud. It seems that in the next 10 years, a hybrid approach will become the most popular model, and that 83% of respondents said they expected to have a technology mix that will combine applications and popular Cloud services.