ERP vendors need to replace license revenue from fading on-premises suites, and social, mobile and analytics all need the cloud to thrive.

Much has been written about the risks and benefits of adopting cloud-based ERP, and whether the technology will ever compete feature-for-feature with its on-premises counterparts. But business pressures in the software industry are conspiring with the transformative trends of cloud, social, mobile and “big data” analytics to make cloud-based ERP, at least in some form, the best option before long.

The real enabler is cloud technology and the easy networking and scalability that it uniquely brings. The cloud is also essential to delivering most of the new capabilities vendors believe their customers have come to expect from their ERP systems.

First, vendors say that users want social media features and social-style collaboration to be accessible throughout the business processes that ERP automates. Social media can’t exist without the cloud.

Secondly, more people are demanding dashboards for their smartphones and tablets that can show transactional data from ERP back ends and help execute everyday tasks. Much of mobile software development is focused on apps that run in the cloud.

The last technology pillar driving the future of ERP — big data analytics — is seeing most of its innovation and business successes in a newer class of vendors, among them Adaptive Insights and Host Analytics, that pull on-premises ERP data into the cloud where it can be analyzed, boiled down, and returned in neat summaries to web browsers and smartphone apps.