Austin, Texas, USA, March 19, 2025
Futurum’s Decision-Maker Survey Finds ERP Offerings From Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle Dominate Both Current and Planned Installations
The market for enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is dominated by three major software vendors, both in terms of currently installed software, and planned future purchases, according to Futurum Intelligence’s 2H 2024 Enterprise Applications IT Decision Maker Survey. ERP software is used to integrate and automate core business processes like finance, HR, manufacturing, supply chain, sales, and procurement, providing a unified view of operations and a single source of truth for data.
The survey reveals that 59.2% of IT decision makers surveyed said their organization utilized Microsoft Dynamics 365 within their organization, followed by SAP, which garnered 57.7% of IT respondents. Oracle’s ERP offerings, meanwhile, were mentioned as being installed at 49.3% of IT decision maker organizations. Note, that the total percentage of respondents adds up to more than 100%, reflecting the use of software for multiple vendors across an organization’s myriad divisions and departments.
Figure 1: Enterprise Deployments of ERP Vendors
The dominance of the three vendors is due in no small measure to each vendors’ ability to streamline processes, improve decision-making, and enhance customer experiences, all while offering scalability, flexibility, and visibility over the organization’s operations. It is also notable that each of these vendors offer additional functionality through diverse applications and application suites, enabling data from the ERP software platform to easily be integrated and used by these applications.
“The benefits of using a robust and well integrated ERP software platform to serve as a single source of truth for an organization cannot be overstated,” said Keith Kirkpatrick, Research Director, Enterprise Applications, The Futurum Group. “In addition to ensuring that data can easily flow between different functional applications and the core ERP, an integrated ERP system enables AI agents – which rely heavily on being able to connect with, ingest, and act upon information held across the organization – to be deployed and managed efficiently and effectively.”
Future Purchasing Plans
Futurum Intelligence’s 2H 2024 Enterprise Applications IT Decision Maker Survey also looked at IT decision makers’ future purchase plans for ERP software. SAP took top honors, with 62.5% of respondents saying they would consider that vendor’s software for an ERP implementation, with 59.7% naming Microsoft Dynamics and 44.4% citing Oracle’s ERP offerings. Again, respondents were allowed to select more than one vendor, which resulted in the response totals adding up to more than 100%.
Figure 2: New ERP Vendors Under Consideration
Notably, the number of respondents indicating they are in the market for a new ERP software platform is far smaller than the number of respondents for the data in Figure 1. Vendors will need to compete across several key criteria to win business, including ensuring scalability, resiliency, and the ability to provide unfettered access to data through integrations with other applications and data sources.
Leveraging Domain or Industry Expertise to Attract Attention
While commonly cited enterprise software purchase decision criteria such as license costs, scalability, and security are still of paramount importance, ensuring the ERP platform includes industry-specific templates or the ability to easily customize fields and workflows to meet a company’s specific or unique needs may also be a way for other vendors to attract attention and gain consideration among IT buyers and influencers.
“While the large SaaS vendors appear to have the lion’s share of the ERP software marketplace wrapped up, smaller vendors can still gain consideration by focusing on other attributes that are valued by organizations,” Kirkpatrick said. “An ERP that has been designed with industry – or sub-industry– specific feature sets, templates, and workflows may ultimately be more suitable and valuable than a one-size-fits-all ERP, depending on their specific needs. That said, these niche applications still need to be both scalable and flexible to not only grow with their customers, but enable the use of modern technologies, such as agentic and generative AI tools.”
Read more in our “2H 2024 Enterprise Applications Decision Maker Survey Report,” available via subscription to Futurum Intelligence’s Enterprise Applications IQ service.
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Author Information
Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
