The story of enterprise resource planning (ERP) is really a story of businesses learning to organize themselves around the latest, greatest technology of the times. In the 1960s through the ’80s, mainframes, material requirements planning (MRP), and manufacturing resource planning (MRP II) brought core business data from file cabinets to centralized systems. Client-server architectures defined the ’80s and ’90s, taking digitization mainstream during the internet’s infancy. And in the 21st century, as work moved beyond the desktop, SaaS and cloud ushered in flexible access and elastic infrastructure.
The rise of composability and agentic AI marks yet another dawn—and an apt one for the nascent intelligence age. Composable architectures let organizations assemble capabilities from multiple systems in a mix-and-match fashion, so they can swap vendor gridlock for an à la carte portfolio of fit-for-purpose modules. On top of that architectural shift, agentic AI enables coordination across systems that weren’t originally designed to talk to one another.