> because there is no consumer/hobbyist path to creating an alternative I think one of the biggest impediments is that the audience is highly risk-adverse, and

> because there is no consumer/hobbyist path to creating an alternative I think one of the biggest impediments is that the audience is highly risk-adverse, and the problem domain is highly risk-prone. There's an enormous incentive to go with an industry "known good" even if you know you're getting thrown over a barrel. ERP conversion are highly, highly likely to fail in terms of on-budget, on-time (more so than the general abysmal record of IT projects). Lack of business ownership/knowledge of processes and requirements is usually at the heart of it, IME. I've been through a couple SAP implementations, a couple SAP upgrades, and conversions to other platforms in my earlier life (Deltek, Dynamics), and they are truly the worst projects on the planet to do. In the government contracting space, Deltek (which most have never even heard of) is such a winner with accounting departments because they're playing to government auditors - the level of scrutiny from just saying "we run Deltek" compared to some roll-your-own solution is miles of difference and ultimate cost. I don't have any relationship with or love for Deltek, btw, this is just my IRL observation and an example of what the "customer" is thinking about - they could care less about technology stack. I think most finance departments just "mind the machine" they have - it's really rare (again, IME) to find people in a finance department who have expert knowledge of the key business processes, report audiences/dependencies, and how everything ties together. You can throw a ton of business analysts at it and still find dark corners that went unaddressed after or the night before go-live. And you're impacting things like payroll, benefits calculations, vendor payments, invoicing, taxation, etc. High risk stuff to kludge up.