ERP users may soon get ahead by going headless, says Rimini Street boss - The Register

The software vendors are rebranding the problem they created.

First Salesforce started talking up "headless CRM." Now the ERP world is picking up the same language. Seth Ravin, CEO of Rimini Street, is pushing the idea of "headless ERP" — essentially decoupling the back-end data and logic from the front-end interface so businesses can build the experience they actually need instead of living inside whatever the vendor designed.

In plain terms: strip the guts out, keep what works, build the front end your way.

If you've spent years forcing your team to work inside a CRM or ERP interface that was built for some imaginary average company — not yours — this is the industry finally admitting that rigid front ends are the problem. You weren't wrong to hate the workflows. The software was wrong to demand you conform to them.

The catch is that "headless" in vendor hands often means a new layer of complexity and, predictably, a new layer of consultants to manage it. The concept is sound. The execution risk is real. You've already paid for that lesson once or twice.

What's worth noting: the underlying idea — that your data layer and your workflow layer should be separable — is exactly how a well-built custom CRM should work from day one.

The vendors are catching up to what operators already knew; they're just charging you for the privilege of getting there.

#CRM #ERP #SalesOps #MarketingOps #MidMarket

Original Source

Weeks after Salesforce boasted about the adoption of "headless CRM," the concept of "headless ERP" crops up. This notion, according to Seth Ravin ...