True - but no one planes for failed installations. You always think they'll happen to "other companies" and not yours. An ERP, in order to be effective, takes

True - but no one planes for failed installations. You always think they'll happen to "other companies" and not yours. An ERP, in order to be effective, takes a lot of buy-in from all your business units, and getting that buy-in will cost the IT people some serious office political capital if the install fails. So what does the average person in a large corporation go with? The big guys who have a proven record. It's similar to the aphorism "no one's ever been fired for picking [IBM, Microsoft, FedEx]" - sure, there's a risk that the thing might fail, but when you go with the largest company around who is almost exclusively focused on this, that risk should go down (I'm not saying that's true - only that that's the working thought process), and even if it does fail, you can fall back on saying "well, it's the industry standard, so I didn't screw up by picking it." Start-up ERP will not go straight into large companies, and it probably shouldn't. Start with small local companies, and slowly work up in size - and then pick a size and stop there. And look at FreshBooks: they're a Toronto start-up that's got some decent penetration into tracking and invoicing sector, which is traditionally the domain of much larger companies. They do that for a while, get small-to-medium sized businesses comfortable with them, and then in two years maybe release a module that does payroll and integrates into the existing one? A year after, once their customers trust both of those, release an HR one? There's your start-up ERP right there...